Exploring polarization within and among interest organizations in the Netherlands

Are interest organizations polarized? While partisan identification of citizens is declining, issue based identification is on the rise. This study investigates whether interest organizations are polarized, as interest organizations are major actors in representing issue based ideologies, and polarization is a highly debated public, political and scholarly topic. We define polarization as a specific outing of conflict where usually two highly differing opinions align along two distinct and hard to reconcile conflict lines. Issue polarization then is a specific kind of polarization, which occurs when the public employs increasingly extreme and opposing positions on specific policy issues. While certain degrees of conflict within societies are desirable for well-functioning democracies, extreme levels of polarization could have undesirable consequences for society as this can harm social cohesion, societal trust and the overall functioning of democratic governments. While we have ample knowledge about the role of conflict in organized interest representation, little is known about whether polarization occurs within and/or between interest organizations. This study taps into this gap by exploring whether and how issue polarization (and/or other kinds of polarization, e.g. ideological polarization or affective polarization) occur within as well as between interest organizations, by interviewing members and representatives of interest organizations active on the provincial level in the Netherlands on different policy areas. We intend to interview members and representatives of interest organizations that represent different (sets of) interests of the same policy issue, and study differences in polarization mechanisms of several policy areas.