Hot or cold? Disentangling the concept of polarisation

Polarisation has enjoyed much public and academic attention in recent years. However, a clear definition or conceptualization is lacking despite its growing importance in public and academic debates and its potentially major effects on the stability and health of our democracies. Even more so, multiple understandings trouble an operationalizable understanding that would enhance empirical research. As polarisation has been studied from different substantive and analytical perspectives, approaches, and traditions, its meaning and hence operability in empirical research have been significantly clouded. This paper, aiming to disentangle the various meanings of polarisation from the cobweb of current understandings, has therefore systematically mapped existing literature about polarisation within the social sciences. It has analysed various definitions of the concept (N = 223) through 1) a novel conceptual framework of six categories that emerged from the coding process, and 2) a resulting novel classification of six theoretical types of polarisation. On the basis thereof, if found that polarisation (in this sample) is a form of increasing distance between actors in three possible ‘modes’ (active conflict, affective change, structural change) and that this distance results from 1) a direct confrontation over a specific conflict about certain ideas and/or identities; 2) occurs on a certain distribution of society and/or politics; or 3) deals with conflicting ways to perceive or construct reality. Ultimately, an analysis of the co-occurrence of the various codes that have been assigned to the definitions reveals two major ideal types of polarisation: cold polarisation, which is a form of structural distance between individuals or elites over general ideas or the general distribution of society; and hot polarisation, in which groups become distant from each other based on their identities and/or how they perceive reality in general. These findings hope to contribute to a more nuanced conceptual framework of polarisation that can be used for further empirical research on the topic.