The paradox of poor representation: How voter–party incongruence curbs affective polarisation

Nahema Marchal,David S Watson

doi:10.1177/13691481211048502

Nahema Marchal, David S Watson

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1177/13691481211048502

Copy DOI

Abstract

Research on the relationship between ideology and affective polarisation highlights ideological disagreement as a key driver of animosity between partisan groups. By operationalising disagreement on the left–right dimension, however, existing studies often overlook voter–party incongruence as a potential determinant of affective evaluations. How does incongruence on policy issues impact affective evaluations of mainstream political parties and their leaders? We tackle this question by analysing data from the British Election Study collected ahead of the 2019 UK General Election using an instrumental variable approach. Consistent with our expectations, we find that voter–party incongruence has a significant causal impact on affective evaluations. Perceived representational gaps between party and voter drive negative evaluations of the in-party and positive evaluations of the opposition, thus lowering affective polarisation overall. The results offer a more nuanced perspective on the role of ideological conflict in driving affective polarisation.

Highlights

Animosity and dislike across political lines – known as ‘affective polarisation’ – is increasingly characteristic of Western mass publics (Boxell et al, 2020; Finkel et al, 2020; Gidron et al, 2020; Reiljan, 2019; Wagner, 2021)
In the context of the British public, we might expect voters to be sensitive to perceived disjuncture with their own party’s policy and adjust their evaluations and preferences. This leads to our second hypothesis: H2: Partisanship positively moderates the relationship between voter–party incongruence and affective evaluations of parties and leaders
Our final hypothesis concerns the moderating effect of issue salience on the relationship between voter–party incongruence and affective evaluations We adopt the same design as the four M1 models, except this time we replace real and perceived voter–party incongruence with weighted versions of those variables, where weight 1 is given to issues a voter identifies as highly important, and 0 otherwise

Summary

Introduction

Animosity and dislike across political lines – known as ‘affective polarisation’ – is increasingly characteristic of Western mass publics (Boxell et al, 2020; Finkel et al, 2020; Gidron et al, 2020; Reiljan, 2019; Wagner, 2021). Webster and Abramowitz (2017) demonstrate that people who perceive political parties to be ideologically far apart are the most likely to be affectively polarised and that priming participants about a candidate’s extreme political preferences drives negative evaluations towards that candidate.

Results

Conclusion