Losing Parents Predicts Hating Partisans? Life Events And Affective Polarization

We get married and fired, have children and lose loved-ones. The most significant events in our lives are nonpolitical. However, the consequences become politically relevant quickly. This paper studies one potential consequence of prevailing recent scholarly interest: affective polarization. While previous research has established several political causes of affective polarization, we propose that life events offer an essential nonpolitical explanation. Specifically, we develop two theoretical mechanisms for why negative life events would strengthen affective polarization, and why positive life events may mitigate it. The first suggests that positive and negative life events shape people’s mood, thus coloring how benevolently they perceive political opponents. The second maintains that life events reduce vs. strengthen self-uncertainty, thus necessitating hostility toward opponents. Two representative studies––a survey assessing exogeneous life events and an online experiment priming them––test these theories. Results remind that although most people’s lives is unpolitical, significant nonpolitical events drive affect.