Divided Nations: The Cultural Foundations of Affective Polarisation

BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grants

Duration: 01 April 2023 – 30 September 2024

Partisan polarisation has been a fact for most Western democracies but recently supporters of opposing parties view not only the party but also the supporters of that party negatively. This phenomenon called “affective polarisation”, describes a type of polarisation encompassing citizens' negative emotional reactions - animosity- towards an out-group on the basis of the party they support. Several recent studies have reported an increase in affective polarisation in many European societies but what explains this phenomenon? In this project, I propose an alternative theoretical explanation hypothesising that affective polarisation, is also a byproduct of cultural divides cutting across partisan lines. The politicisation of cultural identities is increasingly aligned with a partisan identity to a degree that they now divide the new left and far-right voters. This pilot project will serve the purpose of a first small-scale empirical test that will be used to prove the viability of my theory.

Cultural divides: Understanding the role of affective polarisation

Our project aims to situate developments in Greek public opinion in a comparative perspective, and examine how cultural issue cleavages have realigned around such new partisan identities. In doing so, our aim is to examine the extent to which social polarisation on issues that measure the logic of a “culture war” narrative prevail over those that measure “economic” issues and interests. We propose that one way to evaluate the extent of political and societal polarisation, and its effects, is by examining how individuals identify themselves on a dimension from “liberalism” to “conservatism”, and will then explore how this continuum relates to group identities and polarisation over time. After having established evidence for polarisation between liberal and conservative identities, we will ask what factors are responsible for producing and sustaining these changes, and finally, how they manifest in contemporary partisan identities.

Project supervisors: Roula Nezi and Georgios Karyiotis

Research Assistant: Iakovos Makropoulos

Duration of the project: September 2021-September 2022 Funded by the Hellenic Observatory, London School of Economics

Project Outputs: Policy Brief & Research Paper

• The Policy Brief is available here.

• Read the Research Paper of the project, which was published as part of the GreeSE working paper series, GreeSE Paper No.190

Events

• The preliminary findings of the Research Project were presented on 22 March 2023 at a joint Research Seminar along with Professors Sokratis Koniordos' and Dimitri A. Sotiropoulos' Project on ‘The Paradoxes and Mixed Record of Culture Wars in Contemporary Greece’. Read more here. Listen to the podcast here.