Affective Polarisation towards Parties and Leaders in Poland

The next speakers in this ECREA 2024 session are Tomasz Gackowski and his colleague whose name I did not catch; they begin by pointing to the considerable volume of research on social polarisation, and are especially interested in how such dynamics play out in Poland. They worked with a politically representative sample of residents in a major city in Poland, who were confronted with a range of anonymised quotations from politicians about the situation in Poland and Europe. Eye- and facetracking was used to assess their reactions at this point, and again when the author of each quotation was revealed to them; and this was correlated with their self-declared political positioning. A baseline adjustment was applied to correct for ordinary levels of reaction to the statements encountered.

Recent voting patterns had the strongest effect on results; gender and age also had an impact. Overall political preferences had a much weaker effect; political preferences and voting patterns were only weakly correlated; and the leader effect was insignificant in explaining emotional reaction patterns. The leader effect played a role only after the author of each quote was revealed, interestingly – at the actual behavioural level, party preferences are stronger than leader preferences, then, although at the (self-)declarative level they are comparable. Overall, the data provide a strong argument for the existence of political polarisation in Poland; it will be interesting to see how this compares across countries and over time, however.