Dynamics of affective polarisation – ideology, emotions and identity

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; Reiljan, 2020; Wagner, 2021). While research on affective polarisation has recently started to move beyond its original focus on the United States, it is still unclear what precisely the concept actually means, what it entails, and how exactly it unfolds – particularly in multi-party systems, in which divides between political groups are far less clear and political conflict is not necessarily structured along party lines (Harteveld, 2021; Hobolt et al., 2020). Furthermore, while both affect and identity are at the heart of dynamics of affective polarisation, thus far, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the nature of those two core elements, how they come into being, and how they relate to each other. In this paper, I aim to shed light on those ambiguities by providing a conceptual analysis of affective polarisation and the relationship between its three components – ideology, identity and affect – as well as an empirical analysis of the dynamics between those three elements. I argue 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). I then aim to analyse the mechanism through which such periods of intense politicisation or crisis turn into highly affective conflict between different political identities by conducting an in-depth case study on the polarising context of the Covid-19 crisis in Germany (2020-2022). This case study consists of two main parts: firstly, I trace the macro process of the creation of new, opposing, political identities (those in favour of Corona measures and vaccinations and the “Corona-deniers” and “anti-vaxxers”) by studying the political discourse of media and government outlets. Secondly, I investigate how “Corona” came to appear as a relevant criterion of distinction on a meso- and micro-level – and particularly in the social realm – by conducting interviews with individuals who show a strong degree of hostility towards “the other side”. In both parts, I pay particular attention to the process through which identities are constructed and by whom, how individuals conceive of their own political identity and that of others, the role and nature of emotions on each side and the interaction of those different elements. By thus disentangling the different elements of affective polarisation, I aim to not only contribute to a better conceptual and empirical understanding of the dynamics at play but to also path the way for a more nuanced normative assessment of the phenomenon and its role in democratic theory and politics.