What Can De-polarize the Polarizers? Affective Polarization for Party Activists

• In Event: Depolarization Strategies

Abstract

Polarization is a major factor in democratic decay. Still, little is known about party activists and their situation. Are these party activists affectively polarized? Addressing this question is difficult because party activists are difficult to survey; in addition, activists have more to gain from winning, therefore they might eschew actions that reduce polarization and their chances to win elections. Building on recent work in affective polarization and social identity theory, we leverage a pre-registered unique longitudinal dataset of party activists in a multi-party European post-communist democracy. Specifically, we employ a three-wave panel with more than 10,000 responses from members of a new political party, collected immediately before and after the December 2020 Romanian legislative elections. We study whether contact between strong partisans who act as party delegates in the precincts on election day reduces affective polarization. We demonstrate that party activists are affectively polarized, that they are mostly polarized against the out-party elites and that they can plausibly be de-polarized by contact with their out-party elites, but only in relation to perceptions about following the COVID-19 sanitary norms. This research provides a deeper understanding of affective polarization in newer democracies, offers a new database of party activists and is a seminal investigation of the impact of intergroup contact on political activists, long considered the main drivers of mass polarization.

Authors

• Costin Marius Viorel Ciobanu, Aarhus University

• Daniel Sandu, University of Fribourg