Are politically polarizing emotions really detrimental to democracy? Analysis of six European countries

Increasing affective polarization has been observed in many Western countries, however, there are not that many studies on what impacts on this process on the individual level beyond partisanship and sociodemographic characteristics. First, it is little known on how specific emotions drive this conceptually strongly affective process. Also, although the strong belief prevails that affective polarization is detrimental to democracy, and we know that it is driven by support for populist and radical right-wing voting, there are no empirical evidence that these people are also not favoring democratic form of governance. In this paper, using the data from six European countries (France, Germany, Ireland, Spain, Italy and Poland), I will investigate what specific emotions – anger, contempt, anxiety, sadness, and hope – increase or mitigate political polarization and also whether and how these emotions are related to (anti-)democratic and (il)liberal values and attitudes. Results are surprising since polarization per se does not seem to be related to polarization, yet emotion like contempt does. I suggest that this means that political polarization is still an expression of democratic form of confrontation and is not detrimental to democracy but some polarizing emotions are.