Empathy has been proposed as a solution to alleviate interparty antipathy. Recent findings from the US suggest that one aspect of empathy – empathic concern – increases rather than decreases affective polarization. Perspective-taking, another aspect of empathy, has no effect on affective polarization. In this article, we describe a preregistered replication and extension of these findings in the contrasting political context of the Netherlands, to see whether this relationship generalizes beyond the US. First, using a cross-sectional nationally representative sample of 1,258 Dutch voters, we show that empathic concern indeed fuels affective polarization while at the same time we find that perspective-taking reduces it. Second, using a two-arm survey experiment (n = 438), we show that perspective-taking reduces ingroup bias, whereas empathic concern does not. Reflecting on the American and Dutch findings, we conclude that while empathic concern likely contributes to affective polarization, perspective-taking may reduce it.

Affective polarization (AP), a concept that summarizes intense partisans’ animosity towards opposing parties and positive feelings towards their own, has recently received increasing attention. Despite a growing interest in Latin American polarization, there are very few empirical studies on the range and depth of dislike and distrust towards political adversaries in the region, and how this impacts the quality of democracies. This research note uses survey data collected after ten election cycles in six countries to estimate the scope and depth of AP in the region. We measure the extent of polarization in Latin America compared to other Western nations, assess its evolution, and makes some inroads to explain who drives AP. On aggregate, Latin America does not show large AP scores, yet there are clear signs of an upward trend. More than a widespread social phenomenon, the evidence suggests that AP is driven by large intense minorities.

Affective polarization, a concept that originated in the USA, has increasingly been studied in Europe’s multi-party systems. This form of polarization refers to the extent to which party supporters dislike one another – or, more technically, to the difference between the positive feelings towards the supporters of one’s own political party and the negative feelings towards the supporters of other parties. Measuring this gap in Europe’s multi-party systems requires researchers to make various important decisions relating to conceptualization and measurement. Often, our focus could instead lie on assessing partisan hostility or negative party affect, which is easier to measure. While recent research on affective polarization in Europe has already taught USA lot, both about affective polarization and about political conflict in Europe, I nevertheless suggest that research in this field faces four challenges, namely developing better measures, more sophisticated theories, clearer accounts of affective polarization’s importance and successful ways of reducing negative party affect, if this is indeed desirable.

In terms of party systems, Canada's system is an outlier. In our present work, we develop Richard Johnston's account of Canada's polarized pluralism in three ways. First, we link the literature on party systems to social identity theory. Second, we make an empirical contribution by directly testing Johnston's claim that intergroup affect plays a central role in shaping the dynamics of the party system. Using Canadian Election Study data from seven elections, we offer strong empirical support for the theory of polarized pluralism. Congruent with existing research, we find that the most important feature summarizing group-based affect in Canadian politics corresponds with the ideological left/right divide, but we also find that feelings toward groups on a second, uncorrelated axis (feelings toward Quebec and minority groups) shape vote choice. Yet our results show that fault lines in the polarized pluralist structure of the Canadian party system are emerging.

Partisans in the American electorate are affectively polarized, which coincides with the tendency for partisan geographic sorting. Could mate selection pressures contribute to this geographic tendency, and how might they interact with out-party affect? I propose a model in which an individual’s perception of their mate success in a niche is key. I argue that perceived mate success is a function of a niche’s partisanship and one’s out-party affect, which in turn, incentivizes sorting. The model is partially tested with conjoint experiments on multiple U.S. samples. Results show that partisans perceive a lower probability of mate success in niches with greater shares of out-partisans and that mate success interacts with negative out-party affect. I also replicate findings on political mate choice preferences with a more appropriate method. Lastly, this project links instrumentality and affect, which is a departure from past work. In doing so, it contributes to research on the consequences of mate pressures for political behavior.

Affective polarization between partisans is potentially troubling for liberal democracy. Hence, recent research has focused on how affective dislike between partisans can be reduced. Using a survey experiment in Austria, we test whether elite signals matter. Respondents exposed to fictional news stories implying that their in-party might form a coalition with an out-party show reduced dislike toward supporters of that out-party. Our experiment also shows that coalition signals can influence out-party affect even if neither of the two parties signaling cooperation are an in-party. We conclude that cooperation between rivals has an important role in reducing affective polarization.

Stereotypes of the two parties play an important role in political cognition, and a range of recent studies have examined the content and effects of partisan stereotypes. However, little work has studied change in partisan stereotypes over time. We address this question by comparing data on stereotypes of partisans collected before and after the Trump presidency, a time when we might expect individuals' images of the two parties to undergo significant change. Using a structural topic model, we compare responses to open-ended questions asking respondents to list words describing members of the two parties from 2016 and 2021. We find that partisan stereotypes in the 2021 sample are less group- and issue-based and focused more on personal traits. These results suggest that, during the Trump era, members of the mass public came to see the parties in more personalized, character-focused terms, potentially contributing to affective polarization.

Analyses of US panel surveys from 1992 to 1996 have found extremity in political values was associated with increased affective polarization, but that affective polarization was not associated with changes in value extremity during this period (Enders and Lupton, 2021). This note reevaluates the relationships between political value extremity and affective polarization using a 2016–2020 panel survey. Replicating Enders and Lupton's analytical procedures as closely as possible with this more recent sample, I find value extremity is sometimes associated with increased affective polarization. In contrast to Enders and Lupton (2021), however, affective polarization is strongly associated with increased value extremity between 2016 and 2020. These findings suggest that the relationships between political values and affective polarization may have changed since the 1990s, and that values are now influenced by Americans' evaluations of salient political objects, such as parties, presidential candidates, and ideological groups.

We explore the dynamics of affective partisanship and policy divergence in a behavioral voting model. Voters are adaptive and influenced by partisan affect, while political parties are rational and office motivated. We show that the affective partisanship of the electorate and the divergence of party platforms can be mutually reinforcing, thus providing an explanation for the observed co-movement of affective and elite polarization in recent decades. Whether the induced behavioral path exhibits low polarization or high polarization depends on the salience of group identity and the number of moderate voters. Thus, shocks to those factors, perhaps due to such events as economic crises or war, can lead to the polarization or depolarization of the electorate and of the elite.

Public health officials have faced resistance in their efforts to promote mask-wearing to counter the spread of COVID-19. One approach to promoting behavior change is to alert people to the fact that a behavior is common (a descriptive norm). However, partisan differences in pandemic mitigation behavior mean that Americans may be especially (in)sensitive to information about behavioral norms depending on the party affiliation of the group in question. In July–August 2020, we tested the effects of providing information to respondents about how many Americans, co-partisans, or out-partisans report wearing masks regularly on both mask-wearing intentions and on the perceived effectiveness of masks. Learning that a majority of Americans report wearing masks regularly increases mask-wearing intentions and perceived effectiveness, though the effects of this information are not distinguishable from other treatments.

This study investigates to what extent affective polarization, and more specifically hostility towards opposing party supporters, finds its roots in ideological differences. We look into the way out-groups are constructed when there are more than two political parties, and at the role of ideology in this process. Hereby we position ourselves in the discussion between those who argue that affective polarization finds its root more strongly in group attachments vs. those who argue that it is mostly rooted in ideological differences. We conduct our study in the context of the highly fragmented multi-party system of Belgium which enables us to analytically disentangle party label cues from ideological distance. Our findings demonstrate that affective polarization is largely rooted in ideological differences between party electorates in Belgium. Additionally, we find that this particularly holds for citizens who are more ideologically invested, namely those with higher political interest and more extreme ideological views.