Fighting the enemy as a distortion of democratic politics. Affective polarization in the United States, Europe, and Poland

Abstract

This article consists of three parts. The first part discusses the origins of the concept of affective polarization (AP), which was i introduced into academia by a research team from Stanford University, led by Shanto Iyengar, a professor of political science and communication. The team studied the forty-year history of relations between the Republican and Democratic parties in the United States, finding growing antagonism between these parties and their political bases. Using innovative methodology, it showed that over the course of those 40 years, these relations had become increasingly negatively polarized, both between the parties and between the members and supporters of those parties. However, contrary to popular belief, an important feature of this polarization was not the contradiction of political and ideological views. Based on psychological theory of social identification (SIT), the authors argued that polarization was a consequence of a psychological mechanism defined by the theory as “in-group bias and out-group discrimination”. The differences in political or ideological views itself did not have to be significant. It gained significance as an indicator of belonging to different, competing groups. Thus, the basis for polarization was the formation of partisan social identity. This intergroup antagonism was being intensified, by political campaigns saturated with negative and hostile content towards rivals. As AP intensifies, it is increasingly moving beyond the political sphere and encompassing ever wider segments of the society. The second part of the article presents the results of an extensive European research program concerning the level of AP in 32 European countries. The results of this research indicate, among other things, a link between the intensity of this phenomenon and the development of populist parties in a given country. The third part of the article concerns Poland. In Poland, the concept of AP is rarely encountered in the social sciences, but there are numerous publications that deal with similar or identical phenomena. Polish academic literature mentions three periods of polarization in Poland: the post-communist period, the post-Solidarity period, and the post-Smolensk period. An analysis of these periods reveals the mechanisms of development of advanced forms of affective polarization and its consequences for the political and social life of the country.