Political Polarization Research Articles

Political Polarization, Ingroup Bias, and Helping Behavior: Do We Help Others Who Are “on the Other Political Team?”

Abstract The American social and political climate has become increasingly polarized. To explore the effects of politically based ingroup biases as they relate to intended helping of others, we designed a study in which we hypothesized that people who are extreme on the political spectrum will intend to help in-group members more so than out-group members. Using an experimental manipulation, we asked participants to choose if extremely progressive (N = 212; mean age = 22.9; 69% female), extremely conservative (N = 47; mean age = 32.8; 55% male), or neither represented their political beliefs. Participants were randomized to one of two vignettes, each depicting either a pro-blue lives matter or pro-black lives matter scenario. Results showed that, controlling for both age and gender, progressives were less likely to help out-group members compared with individuals in any other condition. Dispositional variables were also measured with dark and light triad traits. Light triad traits tended to positively predict helping intentions across conditions. Implications for understanding the psychology of helping are discussed.

Teaching Controversial Issues under Conditions of Political Polarization: A Case for Epistemic Refocusing

AbstractEducating students for democratic life requires teachers to make difficult judgment calls about whether controversial issues are appropriate for directive teaching (i.e., teaching that attempts to persuade students to adopt a particular view about the thing being taught). To help educators make these decisions, theorists have proposed criteria for systematically differentiating between issues that do and do not qualify for directive teaching. Unfortunately, the epistemic environment of political polarization degrades educators' abilities to reliably assess whether a broad class of politically contested issues meet these criteria for directive teaching. In this paper Eric Torres argues that, while making judgments about whether individual cases warrant directive teaching remains essential and inevitable, educators can best address this problem by engaging in a practice of epistemic refocusing that makes the conditions of educators' own deliberations salient to students, thereby hedging against the effects of bad calls about which issues to teach directively while simultaneously illuminating the constraints of polarization on political cognition, an awareness that is essential to healthy democratic participation in the twenty‐first century.

Word-Level Political Sentiments Inferred From Social Media and Application in Recommendation Diversification

Political polarization is commonly observed in democratic countries. While it allows individual citizens to freely choose sides, it also causes the problem of separation and isolation. Especially in information-seeking behaviors, echo chambers and filter bubbles are observed. In this paper, we present a political sentiment dictionary for analyzing political polarization and increasing information heterogeneity. It takes advantage of large-scale social media data and is thus superior in accuracy and coverage compared to manually crafted dictionaries. Generated from Japanese tweets, more than 50k words in this dictionary cover aspects ranging from political parties and public entities to foods and personal hobbies. We describe in detail the method to construct this dictionary, which can be replicated for other languages and countries. We demonstrate the use of this dictionary in the application of recommendation diversification. We show with real-world e-commerce data that the use of the dictionary can generally increase the diversity in product recommendations, effectively mitigating the filter bubbles.

Americans’ attitudes towards the U.S. women’s national soccer team

ABSTRACT The United States Women’s National Soccer Team has been the recent subject of public celebration and critique, reflecting responses to the team’s competitive successes and activist efforts amid heightened political polarization in the U.S. Yet while studies have considered fandom of the team or trends in media, no research has examined patterns of public attitude towards the USWNT. We use data from a 2023 national survey of U.S. adults (N = 2,032) to examine public attitudes and their demographic predictors, positioning patterns in context of the cultural and political environment in professional sport. Findings show moderately positive views of the team, with just over half of respondents agreeing that they view the team positively and feel positively about team players as role models. Gender, education, and political orientation predict attitudes in regression models, with men, those with lower levels of education, and political conservatives holding more negative attitudes.

Exploring voter turnout dynamics in polarized elections: A group-rule utilitarian framework

Do differentiated policies encourage higher voter turnout than centrist policies? This paper uses the citizen-candidate model and group-based utilitarian approach of costly voting to study how political polarization affects voter turnout under positive voting costs. Two parties enter the electoral competition with a pre-commitment on the platforms, and the winner implements their ideal policy. Comparative statistics results demonstrate that under positive voting costs, the expected turnout is always positive in the presence of political polarization and is only zero when the policies converge. In addition, the expected turnout rises with increased polarization and decreases with voting costs. This study exhaustively demonstrates that positive voter turnout is feasible only when policy differentiation exists.

“Thoroughly Impregnated with Bolshevik Philosophy”

Annie Buller makes for an interesting case study of Canada’s World War II security state and how it functioned vis-à-vis the Communist Party of Canada and its allies. Her experiences speak to gender, party history, and broader elements of political policing, community responses, and confinement experiences. Like her life, her wartime encounters with the Canadian security state were concurrently like and different from those of other criminalized female and male activists at the time about whom we know more. Among the apprehended and incarcerated, female or male, Buller was somewhat of an anomaly and warrants special attention. Buller’s particular situation helps to shed light on lesser-understood elements of the Communist wartime carceral experience, including the lack of trust officials had in these processes at times to accomplish the intended repression and important details about efforts to free those incarcerated. Ultimately, Buller’s case and the movement to liberate her and the other incarcerated members of the party illustrate the power of grassroots activism in challenging oppressive systems.

Patterns of partisan toxicity and engagement reveal the common structure of online political communication across countries.

Existing studies of political polarization are often limited to a single country and one form of polarization, hindering a comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon. Here we investigate patterns of polarization online across nine countries (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, Turkey, UK, USA), focusing on the structure of political interaction networks, the use of toxic language targeting out-groups, and how these factors relate to user engagement. First, we show that political interaction networks are structurally polarized on Twitter (currently X). Second, we reveal that out-group interactions, defined by the network, are more toxic than in-group interactions, indicative of affective polarization. Third, we show that out-group interactions receive lower engagement than in-group interactions. Finally, we identify a common ally-enemy structure in political interactions, show that political mentions are more toxic than apolitical mentions, and highlight that interactions between politically engaged accounts are limited and rarely reciprocated. These results hold across countries and represent a step towards a stronger cross-country understanding of polarization.

How Social Identities Facilitate the Growth of Affective Political Polarization

This study explored the relationships between a selection of social identity factors and affective political polarization among adults in the United States. A broad selection of literature was reviewed and employed in informing a descriptive and inferential statistical analysis of 2008 and 2020 American National Election Studies (ANES) survey data. Multiple regression was used to describe and quantify the relationships between selected variables and affective polarization within the datasets. These methods were paired with tests for differences in means in a comparative analysis of the 2008 and 2020 demographic and political environments, which revealed a statistically significant difference in the levels of affective polarization between the two years. Ideological polarization and ageing stood out as the factors that contributed most heavily to this this growth in affective polarization. Broadly, these findings suggested that demographic and psychographic shifts may have played a role in facilitating growth of affective political polarization across the years. Finally, a post-hoc analysis identified the growth of affective polarization as originating from increased hostility for political out-groups, highlighting the need for further research into other political, social, and economic events that may have triggered the growth of affective polarization.

Interacting as equals reduces partisan polarization in Mexico.

In many contemporary democracies, political polarization increasingly involves deep-seated intolerance of opposing partisans. The decades-old contact hypothesis suggests that cross-partisan interactions might reduce intolerance if individuals interact with equal social status. Here we test this idea by implementing collaborative contact between 1,227 pairs of citizens (2,454 individuals) with opposing partisan sympathies in Mexico, using the online medium to credibly randomize participants' relative social status within the interaction. Interacting under both equal and unequal status enhanced tolerant behaviour immediately after contact; however, 3 weeks later, only the salutary effects of equal contact endured. These results demonstrate that a simple, scalable intervention that puts people on equal footing can reduce partisan polarization and make online contact into a prosocial force.

Who Is Perceived as Deserving? How Social Identities Shape Attitudes about Disaster Assistance in the United States

ABSTRACT Research has shown that as the size of government assistance programs grow, and the recipients of such programs are increasingly non-white and/or non-citizen, public support for them declines. Our study examines this phenomenon on the question of deservingness in federal disaster assistance. Using a 2018 survey experiment that leverages two devastating hurricanes—Hurricane Maria and Hurricane Harvey—that hit different parts of the United States in 2017, we explore how the social identities of race/ethnicity and partisanship affect attitudes about disaster deservingness. Our results demonstrate that although federal disaster assistance has broad support, it is contingent on perceptions about the disaster victim and the type of assistance. Respondents were less likely to support disaster assistance to Hurricane Maria–affected people than those affected by Hurricane Harvey. Moreover, white and Republican respondents were more likely to favor market-based assistance whereas race-/ethnic-minority and Democratic respondents were more likely to support more generous forms of disaster assistance. These findings have important implications for the allocation of disaster funds as climate change intensifies and the frequency of billion-dollar disaster events increases. This is exacerbated by political polarization and heightened social vulnerability due to changing population demographics.

The core of division: Examining how essentialist views of the U.S. underlie right‐wing authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, and nationalism

AbstractWe propose that political polarization stems in part from differing conceptions of one's nation. Four studies tested the hypothesis that national essentialism – conceiving one's nation as possessing an inherent, unchanging essence – underlies three political ideologies: right‐wing authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, and nationalism. Study 1 (n = 263) provides correlational evidence that essentialist thinking about the U.S. positively predicted all three ideological variables, as well as support for conservative policies regarding religion, taxes, the environment, and immigration. Converging experiments show that prompting participants to think about the U.S.’s essence increased support for RWA and nationalism, but not SDO. Study 2 (n = 164) compared an essentialist to a non‐essentialist framing of the U.S., while Study 3 (n = 150) compared essentialist framings of the U.S. to an unrelated concept (music). Parallel mediation analyses show that support for RWA and nationalism mediated the relationship between primed national essentialism and support for conservative policy positions. Study 4 (n = 174) directly replicated Study 2 and went further to test mediators, showing that perceptions of intergroup threat mediated the effect of national essentialism on RWA, while national identification mediated the effect of national essentialism on nationalism. Data and materials are publicly available at: (https://osf.io/srvxk/?view_only=d803fbf4c59c4b7e912f5a345ddb09b9)

Effects of Over-Time Exposure to Partisan Media and Coverage of Polarization on Perceived Polarization

ABSTRACT America is said to be more polarized than ever before, and extensive research examines the causes and effects of political polarization. A less studied but more pronounced trend is that citizens perceive society and politics as sharply divided. We focus on news exposure as a key reason for these perceptions. We disentangle the unique effects of exposure to partisan outlets and to news coverage of polarization in general, whether in partisan or centrist news media. We rely on 9 months of online behavioral data (127,400,000 visits) from large samples in the U.S. and Poland (total N = 2,462 & 2,120), paired with a three-wave panel survey on participants' attitudes and perceptions. We measure individual exposure, over-time and unobtrusively, to partisan outlets as well as to news coverage of polarization through a fine-tuned BERT-based machine learning classifier. We find that both exposures increase perceived polarization, independently, in both countries. Yet, in both contexts, it is news coverage of polarization, regardless of whether it is ideologically left, right, or centrist news outlets, that is the strongest driver of perceived polarization. These changes are confined to personal-level polarization (perceived distance between oneself and members of the opposing party), while no measure significantly influences perceptions of society, more generally, as being polarized. These findings have important implications for our understanding of how the media’s increasing tendency to focus on conflict as a central reporting frame can be the driver of often exaggerated perceptions of partisan divisions.

The Polarization Loop: How Emotions Drive Propagation of Disinformation in Online Media—The Case of Conspiracy Theories and Extreme Right Movements in Southern Europe

This paper examines the influence of emotions on political polarization, looking at online propagation of conspiracy thinking by extreme right movements in Southern Europe. Integrating insights from psychology, political science, media studies, and system theory, we propose the ‘polarization loop’, a causal mechanism explaining the cyclical relationship between extreme messages, emotional engagement, media amplification, and societal polarization. We illustrate the utility of the polarization loop observing the use of the Great Replacement Theory by extreme right movements in Italy, Portugal, and Spain. We suggest possible options to mitigate the negative effects of online polarization in democracy, including public oversight of algorithmic decission-making, involving social science and humanities in algorithmic design, and strengthening resilience of citizenship to prevent emotional overflow. We encourage interdisciplinary research where historical analysis can guide computational methods such as Natural Language Processing (NLP), using Large Language Models fine-tunned consistently with political science research. Provided the intimate nature of emotions, the focus of connected research should remain on structural patterns rather than individual behavior, making it explicit that results derived from this research cannot be applied as the base for decisions, automated or not, that may affect individuals.

Stained glass ceilings: Gender and race in accounting academia in Brazil

AbstractBrazil is divided into five large regions marked by profound economic and social inequalities. Such vast differences can make people feel like “foreigners”, even though they live in the same country. Here, meritocracy is seen as the criterion for assessing and promoting people, which is conflicting given the absurdly unequal contexts in the country. This choice widens inequalities of gender, race and, above all, social class. Between 2000 and 2018, Brazil experienced profound social transformations. Female participation in the labor market grew, although there were still barriers to access and professional advancement for women, which were exacerbated in the case of black women. When it came to leadership positions, they were almost always blocked by processes which depended on subjective decisions from evaluators. These circumstances occur through daily confrontations with processes of sexualisation and racialisation. These transformations were followed in the most recent period by clear setbacks, deepened by the COVID‐19 pandemic and intense political polarization. A milestone in terms of Esperançar, a verb proposed by Paulo Freire (1992), were the 2022 presidential elections, understood as a process of re‐democratisation. The social achievements that have been maintained, however, are ‘advances’ that work differently when the diversity of the population and regional differences are taken into account. With this particular context in mind, the aim of this study is to investigate how the “glass ceiling” phenomenon has been present in the daily interactions and academic trajectory of black women in the accounting field. The question that underpinned this study was: how can the academic accounting environment, considering practice and discourse, boost or hinder the “glass ceiling” phenomenon in the professional career of black female academics? This is a qualitative study with a post‐structuralist approach, based on the adoption of auto‐ethnographic and oral history techniques. The evidence was built up through semi‐structured, in‐depth interviews with female academics who had graduated from postgraduate programmes. This corpus was analyzed from an interpretivist perspective and the findings reveal that the “glass ceiling” phenomenon is present in accounting academia in Brazil and is expressed in barriers specific to the field. Barriers are erected in processes of closure, blocking the path of black women who aim to succeed in prestigious academic spaces, regardless of their level of qualification. In this way, they are conceptualized as “stained glass ceilings”, because the barriers become visible and concrete in a country where racism is a structuring element of social relations.

The Zimbabwe political space

Zimbabwe's post-independence election processes have been predominantly male-dominated, with women relegated to the periphery as electorates or party ‘cheerleaders’. Since the Beijing conference in 1995, Zimbabwe enacted several laws to overcome bottlenecks that have impeded women's participation in political processes, with the 2013 Constitution serving as the ultimate template for promoting women's engagement in mainstream electoral systems. Nonetheless, women’s participation as candidates or leaders in electoral processes has declined significantly since the 2013 Constitution. The study brings to the fore, findings to respond to 3 fundamental research questions which are: 1) what is the interlinkage between economic, cultural, social, and physical spaces with the electoral processes, 2) what are the complex social inclusion factors in political spaces, and 3) what recommendations can be proffered to enhance inclusion of women in electoral processes. In answering the questions, the research draws on content analysis of reports from the Project on Preventing Violence Against Women in Politics Project (VAWP/E), face-to-face interviews, and focus group discussions to offer insights and investigate the opportunities provided by various legal frameworks to increase women's engagement in electoral and political processes in Zimbabwe. The article further systematically explores other important factors and elements that impede and contribute to women's full participation in electoral processes as candidates. This study contends that the availability of excellent legal provisions does not result in increased women's participation in electoral politics as candidates unless there is political will. The study further asserts that participation in social, cultural, economic, and physical spaces interacts in a complex manner and influences women's participation in Zimbabwe's electoral political processes as candidates. Because of the country's political polarisation and the impunity of perpetrators of political violence, the political arena is believed to be intimidating and discouraging, thus not ripe, for women to participate as candidates. The study recommends a wholesome approach to dismantling the complex interlinkages between cultural, social, economic, and physical spaces as obstacles affecting the inclusion of women in electoral processes as candidates. Thus, the study further recommends that existing legal instruments should be complemented by progressively dismantling the social, cultural, and physical forces prohibiting women's participation as leaders in electoral processes. Specific provisions in the Electoral Act may further be used to penalise failure by political parties to field a reasonable number of women as candidates in elections.

Liberal versus conservative distrust: A construal-level approach to dissimilarity in the workplace.

The dramatic rise in political polarization and aggravation of race relations are prominent in the United States. While dissimilarity to others is thought to undermine trust, I challenge the assumption that dissimilarity does so uniformly in the workplace where cross-party and cross-race interactions are structurally induced. Leveraging construal-level theory, I theorize that deep- versus surface-level differences with a coworker interact with ideology to activate higher versus lower construals of trustworthiness, prompting liberals and conservatives to distrust their coworkers in different ways. For liberals, I argue that perceived political dissimilarity undermines perceived person trustworthiness (a higher level/abstract construal, capturing one's trustworthiness generally as a person in the world) and disclosure. For conservatives, I argue that perceived racial dissimilarity undermines perceived role trustworthiness (a lower level/concrete construal, capturing one's trustworthiness specifically in their job) and reliance. Study 1 (a proof of concept) and Study 2 (a longitudinal, dyadic field study) utilize inductive theory-building and exploratory analyses. Studies 3a, 3b(i), and 3b(ii) (three preregistered experiments) support my hypotheses: Liberals tend to view politically dissimilar coworkers as less trustworthy people in the world and refrain from disclosures, while conservatives tend to view racial outgroup coworkers as less trustworthy in their jobs and refrain from reliance. Given liberal and conservative employees' roles in the calcification of political and racial group cleavages, respectively, organizations must determine whether both forms of bias should be addressed-indeed, racial bias is socially unacceptable, whereas political bias is widely tolerated-and, if so, whether interventions should target employees based on ideology. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

The Dimensions of Political Speech – Conceptualising the Origins of Political Hostility

This paper introduces a novel theoretical framework to analyse the increasing polarisation and hostility within US politics. The framework categorises political speech into three interrelated dimensions: locutionary, perlocutionary and illocutionary. By conducting an analytical review of the literature on political behaviour and polarisation and conceptualising the debate within this framework, the paper concludes that the increasing hostility is predominantly influenced by transformations within the illocutionary dimension rather than by changes occurring within the locutionary one.

Composing Time in a Secondary U.S. Classroom: (Not) Challenging Ideological Polarization through Straight and Queer Temporal Movements

Drawing on a larger year-long ethnography at a public, urban, comprehensive high school in the Midwestern United States, this article describes the texts students composed in a co-taught sophomore (grade 10) humanities course combining social studies and English language arts. Bringing together sociocultural perspectives on literacy and composition with queer theorizations of time, I argue for the utility of attending not only to time’s multi dimensionality but also its multi directionality. Doing so in writing instruction can help thaw binary polarization and foster more humanizing temporal and in turn ideological movements. To illustrate, I present an ethnographic case of students writing about the history of gendered clothing in 20th-century U.S. society. I examine how different temporal ideologies had consequences for students (not) reproducing antagonistic, polarized binaries with respect to oppressive values, in particular anti-LGBTQIA+ values as they intersect with class, race, and politics. Although my emphasis is how gender and sexuality intertwine with economics, race, and politics, this article suggests that attending to the multidimensionality and multidirectionality of time is a productive site for scholars and educators committed to praxes of justice in writing instruction.

Leveraging Dissent: A Policy Narrative's Power to Sow Distrust

AbstractThe rise of political polarization and disagreement within the United States and other democracies indicates an erosion of the social contract, a deterioration exacerbated by the balkanization of social media, that can negatively impact our social relationships. Recent anti–Critical Race Theory (CRT) narratives in education provide insights into how policy narratives can be used to sow distrust in an educational context. In this paper Jane Lo and candace moore argue for the ways policy narratives can sow distrust as opposed to mistrust. Mistrust points to an ongoing process of determining trustworthiness, while distrust connotes a more decisive and deliberate lack of trust in a person or institution. Lo and moore argue that educational research should pay more attention to the building of trust or mistrust in schools in the current context, where the anti‐CRT policy narrative, through amplifying and manipulating existing anxieties and fears in order to motivate political action, capitalizes on and seeks to reinforce the natural mistrust of schooling.

Why Civilizations Collapse: The Cruciality of Social Solidarity and the Dangers of Its Absence

This essay examines the complexities of civilizational collapse, proposing that it is not a singular event but a prolonged process driven by internal conflicts and external threats. It begins by defining the concept of collapse and uses historian Jared Diamond’s perspective to analyze how internal strife, such as loss of cultural identity, conflicting ideologies, and political division, can initiate the decline of a civilization due to a fragmentation of social solidarity. The essay then uses historical examples of the Islamic and Roman Empires to illustrate the importance of social solidarity for the survival of civilizations. It also discusses the internal challenges faced by modern civilization, including issues brought about by globalization, political polarization, East-West conflicts, global supply chain shortages, and how these factors can erode solidarity, posing a risk of collapse to the contemporary “world civilization.” The essay concludes by highlighting that internal conflicts and the absence of social solidarity are the primary causes of civilizational collapse, a theory that remains relevant for understanding the challenges faced by the global civilization today.