Affective polarisation is studied retrospectively: we measure existing divides but cannot say which emerging issue will become the next one, or which will pass without a trace. This Workshop joins issue-competition and affective-polarisation research to ask when a newly salient issue becomes out-group animosity, and when it does not. Country contributions reconstruct the cleavage inheritances that make conversion possible in Italy, Spain, Greece and Türkiye, alongside contrast cases. Because Trieste precedes national elections in all four, participants will also register scored, resolvable forecasts of issue emergence, test them within months, and evaluate them at a follow-up meeting.
Two mature literatures have grown up without meeting. Issue-competition research explains how issues reach the agenda (Carmines & Stimson, 1989; Green-Pedersen, 2007; De Sio & Weber, 2014); affective-polarisation research explains how animosity works once a divide exists (Iyengar et al., 2019; Reiljan, 2020). Neither explains conversion, why some new issues generate durable out-group hostility while others, equally moralised, dissipate. Wagner's review names the gap: the field lacks theory linking partisan identities to the specific divides that give them content (Wagner, 2024). Comparative politics has built no forecasting apparatus for issue salience, though prediction is a recognised methodological obligation (Ward et al., 2010).
This requires a workshop, not a panel or a special issue. Conversion cannot be read off cross-national data: half the variance in affective polarisation is within-country (Bettarelli, Reiljan & Van Haute, 2023). It demands country-specific historical knowledge, memory conflicts, clientelism, cleavage collapse, held in communities that rarely meet the quantitative polarisation literature. Four days of mutual reading lets them settle contested definitions and measures (Druckman & Levendusky, 2019). The forecast exercise likewise needs adversarial scrutiny in person: structured elicitation requires facilitated discussion between private rounds by design (Hemming et al., 2018).
Trieste convenes weeks before Greece's electoral deadline and months before those in Spain, Italy and Türkiye: claims made there are testable within months. Existing provision does not cover this. The Standing Group on Affective Polarisation has no prospective strand, the 2025 Handbook consolidates retrospectively, and the sole regionally framed treatment of Southern European polarisation excludes Türkiye.
Bettarelli, L., Reiljan, A., & Van Haute, E. (2023). A regional perspective to the study of affective polarization. European Journal of Political Research, 62(2), 645–659.
Bosco, A., & Verney, S. (Eds.). (2022). The politics of polarisation: Conflictual competition in Italy, Spain and Greece. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003317012
Carmines, E. G., & Stimson, J. A. (1989). Issue evolution: Race and the transformation of American politics. Princeton University Press.
De Sio, L., & Weber, T. (2014). Issue yield: A model of party strategy in multidimensional space. American Political Science Review, 108(4), 870–885.
Druckman, J. N., & Levendusky, M. S. (2019). What do we measure when we measure affective polarization? Public Opinion Quarterly, 83(1), 114–122.
Green-Pedersen, C. (2007). The growing importance of issue competition: The changing nature of party competition in Western Europe. Political Studies, 55(3), 607–628.
Hemming, V., Burgman, M. A., Hanea, A. M., McBride, M. F., & Wintle, B. C. (2018). A practical guide to structured expert elicitation using the IDEA protocol. Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 9(1), 169–180.
Iyengar, S., Lelkes, Y., Levendusky, M., Malhotra, N., & Westwood, S. J. (2019). The origins and consequences of affective polarization in the United States. Annual Review of Political Science, 22, 129–146.
Reiljan, A. (2020). 'Fear and loathing across party lines' (also) in Europe: Affective polarisation in European party systems. European Journal of Political Research, 59(2), 376–396.
Torcal, M., & Harteveld, E. (Eds.). (2025). Handbook of affective polarization. Edward Elgar. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781035310609
Wagner, M. (2024). Affective polarization in Europe. European Political Science Review, 16(3), 378–392.
Ward, M. D., Greenhill, B. D., & Bakke, K. M. (2010). The perils of policy by p-value: Predicting civil conflicts. Journal of Peace Research, 47(4), 363–375.
1: Why do some new issues generate durable out-group animosity while others pass without trace?
2: Must a new issue map onto an inherited cleavage to polarise, or can elites manufacture a divide?
3: Is it the issue's content that polarises, or sorting into blocs that is indifferent to content?
4: Do these mechanisms travel beyond Southern Europe, or is each national inheritance decisive?
5: Which signals anticipate the next divide, and can those forecasts be scored against outcomes?
1: Centre-periphery and the alla turca Kulturkampf: why Türkiye's cleavage survives modernisation
2: The Italian justice cleavage as a substitute for demobilised class and religious divides
3: Why same-sex marriage polarised Spain and Türkiye but not Greece: a paired comparison
4: Salient but inert: why housing tops Spain's agenda without dividing voters into camps
5: Tempi and accountability: out-group animosity without left-right content in Greece
6: Does the mechanism travel? Migration and affect in the Netherlands, Ireland and Hungary
7: Detecting emergence: LLM and manifesto measures of issue salience, and their validity limits
8: A registered forecast for the 2027 election: which issues will divide, and which will not
