Identity Over Issues: Comparing the Reciprocal Effects of Identity-Based and Issue-Based Ideology on Affective Polarization in Spain

Affective polarization refers to the extent that individuals feel sympathy towards in-groups (usually defined, as in this paper, in partisan or ideological terms, although they can be based on other elements, such as ethnicity or religion) and antagonism towards out-groups. The origins of this phenomenon, which has been widely studied in the United States (Iyengar et al. 2019) and, more recently, in non-American multi-party settings (e.g. Wagner 2020), are rooted in social and political identities (e.g. Iyengar and Westwood 2015), although some other works alternatively claim that ideology is the main driver of affective polarization (e.g. Bougher 2017). The present paper is focused on the relationship between ideology and partisan affective polarization, but distinguishing between the identity and issue aspects of ideology (e.g. Popp and Rudolph 2011). In a research located in the United States, Mason (2018) separates both elements and explores their effects on affective polarization between liberals and conservatives, finding that identity-based elements are capable of driving heightened levels of affective polarization than issue-based ideology. Mainly based on this study, our paper contributes to the literature in three main aspects, taking advantage of an original panel dataset collected during months in Spain (the E-Dem Panel Survey Dataset) that contains like-dislike scales not only towards parties or party leaders, but also towards the voters of parties (Torcal et al. 2020). First, we test whether the predominance of identity over issues in explaining affective polarization is kept in an European multi-party system as Spain. Second, we analyze the possible reciprocal effects of affective polarization on identity-based and issue-based ideology, a question little explored in the literature (for a partial exception, see Lelkes 2018). And, third, we explore the extent to which misalignments between individuals’ issue-based position and ideological identity exert an effect on affective polarization, as well as moderate the previous analyzed relationships. The preliminary results show, first, that the predominance of ideological identity over issues in fueling affective polarization is also found in a multi-party setting as Spain. Second, affective polarization significantly and substantially contributes to foster ideological identity over time, but not issue-based ideology. And, third, discrepancies between issue-based positions and ideological identity tend to dampen the levels of partisan antipathy, and also negatively moderate the effect of issue-based ideology on affective polarization. The final picture, hence, is that ideological identity and affective polarization strongly reinforce each other over time, polarizing the Spanish society not around discrepancies across concrete issues but in identity terms. Issue-based ideology exerts more modest affective polarizing effects, and only among those individuals whose positions in concrete issues are quite in line with their ideological identity.