Moving beyond Bipolar Approaches to Affective Polarisation

The next presenter at the ICA 2024 conference is Heysung Lee, whose focus is on affective polarisation in multi-party systems. Affective polarisation has increasingly been recognised as an important factor, but has mainly been studied in bipolar political system like that of the United States, using tools like feeling thermometers; to assess it in multi-polar environments is more complicated. People might well have affective attachments to more than one party in such systems, and it may be necessary to find new methods to assess such attachments.

The present paper focusses on the experience in Colombia, and explores both the traditional bipolar assessment method, mean distance (still assuming that people have one favourite party), and spread (assuming that people might have multiple favourites). Further, it explores whether and how social media use relates to such affective polarisation. This also depends on levels of exposure to homogenous or heterogeneous political talk on such platforms.

The project drew on a national survey in Colombia in July and August 2022. The survey assessed participants’ ideological extremity on a left-to-right scale, and their affective polarisation towards a range of leading politicians; it also asked participants to self-assess their frequency of social media use, and exposure to homogenous and heterogeneous political talk in a number of different communicative situations.

Homogenous talk networks showed direct effects (but it’s not clear here exactly what this means). Heterogeneous talk seemed to show effects in models that took into account multi-polar systems. Ideological extremity played a role in explaining social media use and affective polarisation.