Affective polarization, politicised identities and public sector trust through India’s 2024 elections

Few studies have measured affective polarisation in a society both before and after elections, and fewer still have assessed affective polarisation associated with multiple politicised identities relative to one another, including political party affiliation alongside race, gender, caste and so forth. Here we report the initial findings of a panel survey (N. approx 3,000) to be conducted via in-person interviews in the Indian states of Bihar, Jharkhand and West Bengal, during February/March and June/July 2024. We present the results of explicit feeling thermometer and social distance measures of a range of different politicised groups in these states relative to one another. This allows us to demonstrate the importance of caste for inter-group sentiment within as well as across Muslim and Hindu communities, and to further compare the strength of these affective measures to those associated with people affiliated with prominent political parties (including the BJP and Congress parties). Such patterns are further explored through the use of a conjoint experiment, which is designed to check the faithfulness of explicit responses to social distance measures, given social desirability concerns around issues such as willingness to live nearby to outgroup members (by different outgroup definitions), or for family members to marry them. A second conjoint experiment probes the relevance of these attributes for citizens’ assessments of trust in individual bureaucrats. Drawing on additional survey items, we assess associations between experiences of inter-group violence and the strength of affect towards different politicised groups at the individual level, as well as previous individual experiences of and explicit trust in bureaucrats.