Affective Polarization in the Making: Discursive Shifts on Georgian Party Facebook Pages

This paper explores how affective polarization is produced through everyday political communication on social media in a transitional democratic context. Using Georgia as a case, it analyzes discursive changes on the official Facebook pages of both the ruling party and the main opposition across a one-year period: 2024-2025. Approximately ten milestone posts from each political camp and their surrounding comment threads are examined as emotionally saturated moments that concentrate public attention and intensify partisan meaning-making. The study develops a qualitative codebook that is implemented through a hybrid workflow combining human interpretation with AI-assisted thematic analysis. This approach enables systematic identification of affective expressions, constructions of political threat, moral boundary-making, and future-oriented imaginaries, while preserving interpretive depth. Rather than treating polarization as an individual attitude, the paper conceptualizes it as something that exists because people repeatedly enact it in communication: a social product created through talk, comments, memes, accusations, sarcasm, moral judgments, and emotional performances. The analysis makes three contributions to research on affective polarization. First, it shifts the unit of analysis from survey-measured partisan hostility to the micro-practices of online communication, showing how emotional alignment and moral distancing are enacted in real time. Second, it demonstrates how polarization in post-Soviet contexts is structured by existential frames of national survival and geopolitical belonging, extending theories developed largely in stable Western democracies. Third, it offers a methodological contribution by showing how AI-assisted qualitative coding can be used to trace temporal transformations in affective repertoires without collapsing interpretive nuance. Together, these findings conceptualize affective polarization as a dynamic communicative process embedded in platform-specific practices rather than a static psychological disposition.