Connections between Affective Polarisation and Certainty of Vote in the Netherlands

The next speaker in this ECREA 2024 session is Emma Turkenburg, who begins by highlighting growing concerns about affective polarisation. The worry here is that such polarisation has social as well as political consequences, yet the evidence for such political consequences is mixed; the growth and decline of polarisation in specific societies is highly context-bound and dynamic.

Elections provide a useful backdrop against which these dynamics can be studied: they make politics more salient, and highlight political differences between actors. A useful measure to explore here is certainty of vote: how certain citizens are about whom they should vote for – certainty of vote might be seen as a driver of partisan affiliation and out-group dislike, and thereby of affective polarisation in society; but conversely feelings of affective polarisation might also increase citizens’ certainty of vote as they shut off other voting choices.

The present study explores this in the context of the Netherlands, which in 2023 went through the collapse of its previous government and then held an election in November 2023. The study conducted a seven-wave panel survey of Dutch voters (six before, one after the election), and assessed their affective polarisation (towards parties, and towards other voter groups) and certainty of vote. Certainty of vote as well as affective polarisation towards parties and voter groups increased over these waves, though affective polarisation towards both targets soon plateaued after a sharp initial rise.

Early on, certainty of vote and affective polarisation did not affect each other strongly; later on, affective polarisation towards parties affected certainty of vote more strongly, and affective polarisation towards voter groups and certainty of vote affected each other fairly strongly as well. This might be related to the specific points in time at which these survey waves were administered, however, and almost certainly also represents the increasing salience of the election amongst voters.