"Climate Change and the Polls: Understanding the Rising Polarization in Election Campaigns"

Climate change and the ambitious goals of the Paris Agreement are having a significant impact on society. Efforts to reduce emissions of climate-damaging gases require changes in individual lifestyles that reflect a shift towards more sustainable practices. While these changes are essential for environmental sustainability, they often stand in contrast to changes in daily life. The dual pressure to change current lifestyles to mitigate climate change and fears about the future impacts of climate change could lead to a divide in society. This divide manifests itself, for example, in differing views on how to respond to climate change and the extent of lifestyle changes required. This social conflict is already evident in polarized climate debates in several countries. Polarization in the climate debate can slow down or even block democratic processes, which in turn complicates climate mitigation. In extreme cases, polarization can even divide a society. However, polarization can also have positive effects, particularly on the legitimacy of elections and political decisions. For example, increasing polarization can increase voter turnout and provide voters with a clearer basis for decision-making. In this context, a short-term increase in electoral polarization could help strengthen the legitimacy of climate policy measures and promote their implementation. This raises the question of whether increasing polarization in the election campaign is a general effect across all groups, or whether it is driven by one group with a particularly polarized position. This in turn would make it easier to vote, but would tend to undermine the legitimacy of the election. Polarization research often distinguishes between ideological and affective polarization. Ideological polarization refers to different opinions and beliefs, while affective polarization describes the emotional distance between groups. Voting decisions reflect not only substantive arguments, but also voters' group affiliations. Polarization in elections thus results from a combination of both types of polarization and is manifested in realized polarization. Most studies of polarization analyze either ideological or affective polarization over longer periods of time and do not focus on short-term changes. As a result, the dynamics of polarization in the short term are often overlooked. This study examines polarization in the climate policy debate on a monthly and weekly basis. We use behavioral data and a temporal network approach in combination with temporal community detection. The results show that polarization increases in the run-up to elections. Furthermore, I show that this increase in polarization is driven by both a strengthening of ingroup identification and an increasing distance between the poles of opinion. The results also shed light on the long-term development of polarization. Since the results show an increase in polarization in the run-up to elections, fluctuations in the long-term development of polarization may depend on the time of the survey and should be taken into account in future research.