An eye for an eye: Affective polarization and its effects on support for reciprocal democratic norm-breaking

Scholars warn that affective polarization – the tendency of partisans to dislike or even loathe supporters of opposing political parties – undermines citizens’ commitments to principles and norms on which democracies are founded (i.e., democratic support). While speculation about the potential consequences of affective polarization on democratic support is rife, the theoretical underpinnings for such a relationship remain unclear. To address this gap, we propose a new and innovative mechanism: the reciprocal norm-breaking mechanism. This novel mechanism draws on psychological theories about negative reciprocity and posits that affectively polarized citizens are more likely to perceive the behaviour of political opponents as undemocratic. Strong social identities – like partisanship – can cause perceptual biases that make people judge their own group more favourably in comparison to out-groups. Consequently, affectively polarized citizens are expected to be biased in their assessment of the behaviour of political parties, leading them to flag the acts of political opponents as undemocratic even if the given act does not objectively breach any democratic principles or norms. In response to the alleged norm-breaking, we argue that affectively polarized citizens become more likely to support reciprocation and hence condone attempts of democratic erosion by their own political camp. Specifically, we argue that two different underlying motivations can drive support for reciprocal norm-breaking. First, citizens may experience an eagerness for revenge as a response to increased anger and hatred at the other side for allegedly violating democratic principles. Second, citizens may feel the need to re-establish an equilibrium in fairness, meaning that they view norm-violations as legitimized given the opponent’s prior breach of rules. We will test this mechanism through the use of between-subjects survey experiments in the UK. Participants will be exposed to newspaper articles that describe procedurally ambiguous behaviour by the opposing political camp and are asked to evaluate the extent to which this behaviour is undemocratic. Afterwards, they are asked to evaluate the acceptability of norm violations of their own party. At the conference, we will present the experimental design and the result of a pre-test to maximize the ability to incorporate the provided feedback.