Interconnections between Affective Polarisation, Populist Attitudes, and Political Distrust

The next speaker in this I-POLHYS 2024 session is Danilo Serani, whose focus is on affective polarisation, political distrust, and populist attitudes in Italy. Affective polarisation seems to be on the rise globally, but how can we explain this development? It may be driven at least in part by what Danilo calls ‘demand-side populism’ (individuals’ pre-existing populist attitudes), as well as by underlying political distrust.

Affective polarisation describes strong attachment to one’s own in-group as well as negative sentiment and outright animosity towards out-groups. This is more complicated in multi-party than bipolar political systems, of course. Populism is centred on ‘the people’, opposed to ‘the elites’, and embraces a Manichaean, simplistic vision of politics that reduces complex decisions to choices between ‘good’ and ‘evil’. Both overlap in their juxtaposition of good in-groups and bad out-groups, therefore, but there are also distinctions between them.

A third component of this interrelationship is political distrust. Affective polarisation may be driven in part by political distrust, and the same is true for populist attitudes: because politics is seen as overly complicated and politicians are seen as untrustworthy, individuals may be drawn to specific political groups and leaders in whom they place disproportionate affection and trust.

The present paper explored this through a three-wave panel study of around 1,000 citizens in Italy between September 2021 and April 2022. Both political distrust and populist attitudes are highly correlated with affective polarisation; interestingly, for people with highly populist attitudes, high levels of political distrust lead to high affective polarisation, but the opposite is true for people with low levels of populist attitudes. This significant divergence requires further explanation.