“How Do We Put the Country Back Together?” Mitigating Affective Polarization Through Mediated Intergroup Contact

Abstract

ABSTRACT Affective polarization presents an ongoing threat to the political and social functioning of democracies as partisans increasingly dislike and distrust opposing partisans. Because engagement with political media is one way by which citizens understand partisan dynamics, we hypothesize that exposure to positive mediated intergroup contact via an entertainment narrative may be able to attenuate feelings of affective polarization—especially through identification with a character that expresses differing political views—but also that negative intergroup contact via a political debate could exacerbate partisan tensions. This premise is tested in an experiment (N = 544) that juxtaposed real-world examples of political media using excerpts from the U.S. television comedy The Conners and the 2020 U.S. presidential debates. Two common indicators of affective polarization, a feeling thermometer and social distance, were used to measure the affective gap between Democrats and Republicans. For the purposes of our analyses, a brief implicit association test (BIAT) was also conducted to measure participants’ implicit bias toward members of the political outgroup. We find evidence that exposure to positive intergroup contact can attenuate partisan tensions, especially through identification with the character belonging to the opposing political party, but that identification with the co-partisan character can further exacerbate negative affect.