So, does affective polarization change citizens’ winningness to support democratic norms or participate? It depends on what “low AP” we’re comparing “high AP” to. 🧵10/10 Thanks to everyone who helped us develop this paper along the way! : )

unpolarized groups and, crucially, that the two differ on our various outcomes. Spoiler alert: we find that no group is consistently “better” for democracy (ie more trusting, democratic, participating). It seems that different groups contribute different elements to our democratic dinner. 🧵9/10

We conduct cluster analyses on 3 US datasets to find the relevant patterns of unpolarized citizens and map those clusters on a bunch of outcomes (trust, norm support, partisan behavior, participation). We find TWO relevant 🧵8/10

above? In the paper, we use a meal metaphor: whether people LOVE or HATE two meals matters greatly for how they think about the chef and whether they want to participate in a dinner. 🧵7/10

this person has an AP score of 10, denoting low affective polarization. But shouldn’t it matter whether we’re comparing affectively polarized individuals to a baseline that loves both parties, feels lukewarm toward both parties, hates both parties, or a heterogeneous mix of all of the 🧵6/10

This operationalization nicely differentiates between high and low affective polarization. But it treats everyone with low affective polarization scores alike. To illustrate this for a 2-party case: no matter if someone likes both parties with 80 and 70, 50 and 40, or 30 and 20, 🧵5/10

We argue that this blind spot is a consequence of how we measure AP: The standard operationalization calculates affective polarization as the difference (or, in multi-party systems, variance) in people’s warmth toward the available parties. 🧵4/10

group and take them as the reference we compare affectively polarized people to. But the share of citizens who is NOT affectively polarized is huge and treating all of them alike risks masking heterogeneity. 🧵3/10

One week left to apply for this PhD position in my project on citizens’ role in democracy ⬇️⬇️