Contempt towards Far Right and Anger towards Populists? Differentiated Affective Polarization in European Multi-party Systems

One of the most widespread explanations of increasing party hostility, or affective polarization, is the increasing strength and politization of people’ partisan identities, very often based on the findings of Social Identity Theory. However, by using this theory as a basis for an explanation, we run a risk to develop both, a too broad and too narrow explanations of the phenomenon. Too broad in terms of making almost an automatism from the political partisanship and out-party hostility. Too narrow in that it ignores the strongly different dynamics of European multi-party systems where in contrast to the American biparty system, the attachment to one political party could translate into hostility to different political forces. The increasing evidence in the affective polarization research field points to the differentiated patterns of out-party hostility in European countries: It indicates that dislike of far-right populist parties overrides the average dislike of other parties and cannot be explained by factors usually considered important for increasing polarization. With this study, however, I want to go a step further and also look at different discrete emotions related to different parties or party groups. With the data on 6 European countries, I will analyze how different emotions – contempt, anger, anxiety, sadness, and hope – are related to different parties in specific party systems as well as to party groups in general. The pattern arises which associates hope, anxiety and sadness with support for traditional parties and decreased polarization, and contempt and anger with increased polarization, whereas contempt elevates it through far right and populist right voting and anger through populist voting more generally.