Do Political Surveys Overestimate Affective Polarization? (pre-registered Report accepted at Journal of Politics)
(with Alexandra Jabbour, Maxime Coulombe, Nadjim Fréchet, Thomas Gareau Paquette, Juliette Leblanc, Baowen Liang, Valentin Pautonnier, Thomas Rafie, Matthew Taylor, Virginie Vandewalle, Maxime Bergeron, Filip Kostelka and Ruth Dassonneville)
Political scientists have drawn attention to the possibility that individuals in established democracies are affectively polarized. Our knowledge about the extent to which individuals are affectively polarized and dislike supporters of other parties is entirely based on surveys that prime respondents to think about politics and their own partisan identity and political preferences. Our registered report presents a design to investigate the impact of such surveys on estimated levels of affective polarization and to determine if polarization is sensitive to the context within which individuals are asked to rate parties. Using samples from the United States and Germany, we will experimentally assess whether measuring affective polarization in a political versus a non-political survey produces systematically different estimates of affective polarization. Our results will help clarify whether these estimates reflect how affectively polarized societies are.
Do Voters and Non-Voters Differ in Their Policy Preferences? (R&R at European Journal of Political Research)
The declining voter turnout in democracies has raised concerns regarding its impact on the democratic quality. Yet, the extent to which low turnout may pose a problem for democratic representation in Europe remains unclear. Do the policy preferences of voters and non-voters differ? This research aims to answer this question through three studies. Utilizing the European Election Study, Study 1 systematically investigates this question in 29 European democracies on the left-right scale, economic attitudes (i.e., redistribution, regulation, spending), social attitudes (i.e., immigration, same-sex marriage, environment, and civil liberties) and the European integration. The results reveal some disparities between voters and non-voters. However, these disparities are sporadic, even within a given country, indicating that they are not the norm. Nevertheless, when such disparities do arise, they are not trivial. The analysis of how the electorate’s preferences would change under hypothetical full turnout suggests potential representation biases stemming from the disparities between voters and non-voters. Study 2 addresses concerns regarding the reliability of reported turnout by using validated turnout data from the 2015 British Election Study post-electoral survey. This study corroborates the findings regarding the disparities between voters and non-voters on several policy preferences. Moreover, it shows that analyses based on reported and validated turnout produce similar results. Study 3 relies on data from the British Election Study Internet Panel, covering three general elections, to distinguish between regular voters, peripheral voters, and perpetual non-voters revealing significant heterogeneity in policy preferences among these different types of voters. Overall, this research suggests that even though voters and non-voters in European democracies typically share similar policy views, occasional disparities may emerge. When such disparities occur, low voter turnout can introduce representation bias in policy preferences, with implications for democratic representation and party strategies.
Perceptions of Parties’ Ideological Positions Before and After Elections (R&R at Political Behavior)
(with Oguzhan Alkan, Ruth Dassonneville and Zeynep Somer-Topcu)
While citizens are sufficiently informed about parties’ ideological stances during electoral periods, we know little about how the perceptual accuracy of party positions evolves beyond the election campaign period. We argue that, during election campaigns, when political information is more readily available, citizens perceive party positions more accurately, but this perceptual accuracy decreases outside of election time. Leveraging the as-if random variation of interview timing in the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems dataset across 21 established democracies and the panel data structure of the British Election Study Internet Panel, we show that perceptual accuracy declines post-election and increases during the pre-electoral campaign period. Additional analyses suggest that these ups and downs in accuracy are mainly due to people becoming less informed rather than updating their perceptions with new information. These findings have important implications for democratic representation.
What Drives Affective Polarization? Real-World Evidence of Ideological and Identitarian Roots of Affective Polarization (R&R at Political Behavior)
Does elite ideological polarization increase mass affective polarization? I study this question with a real-world sudden increase in elite polarization in the United Kingdom resulting from (1) the Labour Party’s sudden leftward shift in 2015 under a new leader, and (2) the Conservative Party’s sudden change in Brexit policy following the 2016 referendum. Using panel data, I find that ideological elite polarization heightens affective polarization among citizens, particularly among non-partisans, providing evidence that affective polarization is also rooted in ideology. Importantly, among partisans, in-party enthusiasm drives the changes in affective polarization more than out-party hostility. Lastly, I show that the causal direction between how citizens perceive elite ideological polarization and how affectively polarized they are is bidirectional, suggesting that while some levels of affective polarization are inherent in democracies, affective polarization can, to a certain extent, be tamed by moderate position-taking by parties. These results carry important implications for the study of affective polarization across democracies.