Beyond Partisanship: Affective Polarization Between Opinion-based Groups During the Covid-19 Pandemic

Affective polarization is the process through which members of opposing political camps develop feelings of animosity towards each other. So far, scholarship has primarily looked at this phenomenon through the lens of partisanship. Only recently, Hobolt, Leeper, and Tilley (2020) showed that affective polarization can also emerge from opinion-based groups, i.e. political identities that form around extraordinary issues and cut through partisan lines. We contribute to this literature by documenting the emergence of affective polarization in a context of low partisan discord where social sorting is less intuitive. We study divisions around the government response to the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany, a multiparty system where all established parties supported certain freedom restrictions to contain the pandemic. Drawing on original data from two waves of a representative online panel (N1 = 3207; N2 = 2874), we demonstrate that tensions about public health measures developed into a new conflict distinct from partisanship. Numerous indicators and a survey experiment indicate that supporters and opponents of the government response showed ingroup favoritism and outgroup denigration, with the larger group of supporters generally expressing stronger feelings of animosity. We discuss the implications for future research and what it means for democracy when deep political rifts are not captured by the party system. Hobolt, S. B., Leeper, T. J., & Tilley, J. (2020). Divided by the Vote: Affective Polarization in the Wake of the Brexit Referendum. British Journal of Political Science, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123420000125