Mass Polarization and Democratic Decline: Evidence of a Negligible Relationship

• In Event: Polarization, Populism and Threats to Liberal Democracy

Abstract

An antagonistic political culture has long been thought to pose a threat to liberal democracy. More recently, many scholars have proposed a link between political polarization and democratic breakdown, yet non-anecdotal evidence for this prominent theory remains thin. By contrast, I suggest that polarization may actually give citizens reason to recommit to democratic principles and I present the first broadly comparative analysis of the relationship between polarization and democratic backsliding, the modal form of autocratic reversion in the post-third wave era. Using a novel measure of polarization, I construct a data set that includes ideological and affective polarization estimates for as many as eighty-nine countries and forty-eight years. These time series data indicate that both ideological and affective polarization exert negligible causal effects on the level of democracy. In unpacking this null result, I present evidence that polarization may be associated with increased diffuse support for democracy and increased prevalence of pro-democratic mobilization. Despite widespread concern over the fate of democracy in polarized polities, comparative evidence since the start of the third wave suggests that mass polarization itself poses little threat to democratic regimes.

Author

• Isaac Mehlhaff, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill