How to cool down affective polarization? A new perspective of the "ICED" framework

Affective polarization has become one of the most severe and proliferating challenges for democracy in recent years. As evident in the U.S., Switzerland, Finland, Netherlands, Israel and Taiwan, electorates across democratic countries have become less tolerant of their partisan rivals. Though many works have analyzed this issue, they rarely discuss how we can resolve affective polarization. This article provides a systematic framework to organize and categorize existing research that proposes solutions to affective polarization. The framework, “ICED (identity, cooperation, empathy, deliberation),” includes works from political science, psychology and communication studies. The four categorizations stand for four different approaches: The identity approach resorts to a superordinate identity to solve the existing partisan rift. In other vain, the cooperation approach believes broad national unity government is the key. The empathy approach points out the emotional factor in affective polarization and proposes reciprocal group reflection to initiate long-term attitude shifts. Lastly, the deliberation approach takes on the angle of deliberative democracy, claiming that the deliberation process can be the catalyst for reconciliation.