In the last decades, it has often been assumed that polarization has risen across the Western world (e.g. Iyengar & Westwood, 2015; Robison & Mullinix, 2016), particularly around climate change. For long, this rise was mainly seen as a potential threat to democracy (e.g. Iyengar et al., 2019; Kingzette et al., 2021). Increased levels of certain types of polarization expressed in the media or by politicians may lead to declining levels of citizens’ trust in politics, but also less willingness to compromise on important issues among politicians themselves, leading to political inaction and potential gridlocks (McCoy et al., 2018). However, the presence and development of different forms of polarization in political debates, and importantly, in the media, deserves more scholarly attention.
The existing literature regarding polarization in multi-party systems focuses mainly on measuring polarization among citizens. (e.g. Harteveld & Wagner, 2023; Levy, 2021). Surprisingly, a focus on elite-level polarization containing effective measures of polarization in parliamentary debates (Goet, 2019) or news media is largely lacking. To circumvent the existing conceptual unclarity (Kubin & von Sikorski, 2021), we distinguish between three different, though related forms of polarization: (1) ideological polarization: the degree to which actors disagree with each other on the subject at hand (Esteban & Ray, 1994); (2) affective polarization: the extent of having negative feelings towards others who you consider part of an outgroup (Iyengar et al., 2012); and (3) factual belief polarization: the amount of division between individuals in their perception of reality (Lee et al., 2021; Rekker, 2022).
This study focuses on the development of different types of polarization in the climate change debate in The Netherlands, which is a suitable case to study polarization as the debate has periods of high and low salience and contestation. Furthermore, the Dutch civic context is characterized by a coalition-oriented multi-party system, a pluralized media-system; and a deep-rooted history of consensus-decision making, making it a least-likely case for high levels of polarization to occur, suggesting the results could be indicative for less pluralist political/media systems as well.
Utilizing a novel longitudinal content analysis of parliamentary debates and newspaper articles, this study accurately assesses the development of polarization in politics and media in The Netherlands between 2010-2021. We developed two related codebooks to measure different polarizing frames in (1) parliamentary debates (N =~2000) and (2) newspaper articles (N =~1600). These debates and news-articles were then manually coded to assess the presence and development of the different forms of polarization.
Preliminary results from the political realm indicate that levels of ideological polarization have remained stable, while affective polarization is slowly increasing, most strongly indicated by an increase in the use of uncivil language, mainly used the ecological party (PvdD) and populist radical right (PVV & FvD). Factual belief polarization is found in the first and final years of the studied period and is solely driven by populist radical right politicians. Moreover, these preliminary results provide further evidence that affective and factual belief polarization does not have to be rooted in ideological differences.
