Varieties of dislike - Using in-depth interviews to assess (individuals’ reasoning behind) feeling thermometer responses in research on affective polarisation

Affective polarisation has become a topic of great concern in liberal democracies across the world. Research looking at the potential causes and consequences of growing political animosity is advancing rapidly, increasingly also focusing on multi-party systems and thus moving beyond the concept’s original context of the United States. However, one of the core components of affective polarisation – dislike – remains fundamentally ambiguous and is in need of further conceptual and empirical clarification. This paper presents an empirical study that uses semi-structured qualitative interviews to shed light on the different negative evaluations, emotions and associations that individuals have when answering the standard dislike-based feeling thermometer questions that are frequently used to measure affective polarisation. By asking respondents to elaborate on their survey responses, it tentatively shows that, 1) individuals can have multiple relevant political out-groups, 2) those out-groups are not considered homogenous but different evaluations are given to different sub-groups, mostly depending on the perceived level of ignorance, 3) initial answers are often relativized after deliberation, 4) dislike can cover different discrete emotions, which are often moral emotions such as contempt and pity, and which differ per sub-type of the out-group. The paper concludes by highlighting conceptual implications of those findings as well as implications for quantitative survey research on affective polarisation.