“That’s Undemocratic” Versus “I Want to Be Able to Look at Myself in the Mirror” – Citizens’ Accounts for Different Types of Dislike in Affective Polarisation in the German Climate Debate

The debate around climate politics is increasingly polarised – not only in terms of substantive positions and growing backlash against the socio-ecological transformation, but also in how citizens with different opinions on the issue relate to each other. While several empirical studies thus diagnose “affective polarisation” between those supporting stricter climate policies and those opposing them, we know very little about what exactly is behind such mutual dislike. What does “dislike” actually mean, and what reasons do citizens themselves put forward for disliking their political out-groups in the context of the climate debate? In this paper, I address these questions by using an innovative combination of qualitative methods, which allows me to gain insights into the complex interplay of emotions, moral convictions and interpretations that play into the different ways in which citizens relate to their political out-groups in the German climate debate. Building on in-depth interviews, cognitive interviewing and participant observation in the context of the conflict around the protests of the Letzte Generation in Germany (2022-2024), I show that there are different ways in which citizens “dislike” their political out-groups, with different reasons and different normative implications for democracy: Dislike can be directed at the political position of a group or the group members as such – and dislike can be “agonistic” (qualified or counter-balanced with additional considerations), or “antagonistic” (unqualified or black-and-white). Analysing how my interview partners account for such different ways of disliking their out-groups in the context of the climate debate, I suggest that in the case of antagonistic dislike, they perceive their out-groups as a threat to different core values (morality, procedural fairness, survival and truth), which can make political intolerance and social avoidance of out-group members seem almost imperative in the desire to be a good citizen. However, such antagonistic dislike is by no means an automatism. I thus describe how citizens counter-balance their dislike, even in the face of deep concerns and existential crisis. I conclude by reflecting on the more systemic features that might help transform antagonistic dislike into more agonistic forms.