Culture wars? Assessing the impact of affective polarisation on cultural battles in Europe.

Research suggests that social polarisation and party preferences can reinforce ideological distinctions in society along cultural issues such as abortion, gay rights, and climate change. This polarisation, based on social identities and existing social cleavages, is gradually absorbed by partisanship and has become the primary cleavage dividing citizens to a greater extent than other salient issues. For example, why do many voters for far-right parties also embrace climate change skepticism, opposition to homosexual marriage, and anti-vaccine movements? A synoptic answer to this question is related to the politicisation of cultural social identities that are increasingly aligned with a partisan identity to a degree that they divide the new left and far-right voters. In our article, we argue that societal conflicts around cultural issues, such as the ones described above, can create group identities and affective polarisation that is as intense as that of partisanship. To test our hypotheses, we use a novel dataset of more than 1 million people. The dataset combines over six comparative and longitudinal studies (i.e., EVS, Eurobarometer, CSES) covering countries as diverse as Albania, Poland, the Netherlands, and the UK between the early 1980s until 2019. By employing multilevel structural equation modeling we identify cross-country trends in affective polarisation, and we link those trends to latent constructs representing culture wars. Our study emphasizes the need to account for the impact of culture wars on affective polarisation.