Disentangling the hostility: Affective polarization, discrete emotions and their social consequences

Affective polarisation is on the rise in a number of democracies, yet empirical evidence concerning its consequences remains limited at best. Excessive hostility is presumed to threaten democratic norms of compromise, co-operation, and deliberation, and perhaps even pave the way towards political violence. We argue that in order to understand the consequences of affective polarisation, we first need to disentangle the negative emotions captured by feeling thermometers. In the present study, we identify three behavioural tendencies – avoidance, intolerance, and support for violence – that affectively polarised citizens might engage in. We theorise that different discrete emotional responses – obscured by current thermometer measures – will lead to different consequences downstream. Specifically, we expect citizens that experience fear in response to outparty supporters to be more prone to avoidance behaviours, whilst disgust will lead to intolerance and anger to support for violence. These expectations are tested using a unique cross-national survey experiment, that includes a stimulus designed to exogenously activate or dampen affective polarisation. Due to be fielded in February 2022, we test these assumptions in nine countries – Brazil, the US, the UK, Germany, Poland, Italy, France, Spain and Sweden. Case selection accounts not only for variation in political system, but also levels of affective polarisation and the strength of partisan ties (or negative partisanship, as in the case of Brazil). Our results will contribute to the emerging literature as attention shifts from treating affective polarisation as a dependent variable, to instead viewing it as the independent variable.