‘If you’re not with us, you’re against us’ – Identities and affective polarisation in times of intense politicisation and crisis

There seems to be a widespread sense that politics and societies in liberal democracies are becoming more and more hostile and divided. Beyond mere ideological disagreement, political conflict is turning into a question of ‘us’ versus ‘them’, a phenomenon increasingly referred to as ‘affective polarisation’ (e.g., Iyengar et al., 2019; Harteveld, 2021; Reiljan, 2020; Wagner, 2021). While political identities are at the heart of those dynamics of affective polarisation, thus far, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the nature of those identities, how they come into being and how they relate to other, simultaneously existing, identities. In this paper, I aim to shed light on those issues by taking a closer look at the role of identities in dynamics of affective polarisation in crisis contexts. The paper consists of three main parts: In the first part, I argue that that dynamics of affective polarisation can arise not only out of conflict between pre-defined social and political identities, such as partisanship or national, ethnic or religious identities, but also out of processes of intense politicisation (e.g. Brexit in the UK or debates about abortion in many Latin American countries) and crises (e.g. the refugee crisis, the climate crisis or the recent Covid-19 pandemic), in which identities are formed through processes of politicisation themselves. While initially based on ideological or strategic disagreements on the right way to handle a certain policy issue or crisis, the construction of political identities based on those disagreements can create a division between different camps, in which members on each side of the division become increasingly hostile and, sometimes even within families or friends groups, refuse to talk to each other. In the second part, I present an in-depth study of the mechanisms through which a crisis can transform into dynamics of identity-based affective polarisation using the context of Covid-19 in Germany as a case study. Building on an analysis of public discourse as well as interviews with affectively polarised individuals, I pay particular attention to how identities are constructed by members of the in- as well as the out-group, as well as to the role that certain emotions such as fear, anger, contempt and hope play in this process. In the third part, I briefly reflect on the observation that there can be multiple dimensions of identity-based affective polarisation as well as multiple crises structuring a given society either simultaneously or consecutively. In order to understand how people navigate different, possibly conflicting identities and whether there are signs of alignment between different conflict dimensions, I take a first look at the interplay of three politicised – and polarised – issue debates and/or crises that can currently be observed in Germany: Corona, the Climate Crisis and Identity Politics. By thus disentangling dynamics of identity construction and affective polarisation in times of crisis, I hope to not only contribute to a better empirical understanding of the phenomenon but to also path the way for a more nuanced normative assessment of its role in democratic theory and politics.