Vertical vs Horizontal Polarisation: Untangling Feelings Towards Elites and Voters

The way people feel towards other voters has garnered enormous attention with the rise of affective polarisation, or hostility across political lines. As this literature grows increasingly comparative, scholars often rely on the widely available feeling thermometer towards political parties. This carries the strong assumption that (dis)affect towards parties (vertical) extends to voters (horizontal). We test this assumption both at the descriptive and correlational levels using two different data sources covering 10 countries, 25,000 individuals and 64 parties. Firstly, we ask whether people differentiate between parties/politicians and voters of said parties. Secondly, we examine what individual and party-related factors are associated with a greater gap in evaluations. Finally, we assess how party- and voter-based measures of affective polarisation correlate with concrete measures of political hostility. Overall, we find consistent and systematic patterns of differentiation, which suggests that vertical and horizontal polarisation are empirically distinct concepts. These findings hold important implications for the study of affective polarisation, especially in a comparative perspective.