This paper focuses on the increasing animus between Republican and Democratic partisans towards each other’s party. Over the past three decades, these rival-party feelings have grown significantly colder. In fact, rival-party feelings of stalwart partisans are now among the lowest on record, comparable to how white Americans feel towards undocumented immigrants. This gradual cooling of rival-party feelings has been labeled “affective polarization” (Iyengar, Sood and Lelkes, 2012). In this paper, published in Public Opinion Quarterly, I break down and decompose the over-time trend of affective polarization, using a Blinder-Oaxaca approach and data from the American National Election Studies, to identify three processes that help explain how rival-party and own-party feelings changed. I find, contrary to previous research, that “sorting” – the “correct” matching of liberal-conservative ideology and party membership – has a limited effect on the cooling of rival-party feelings. In fact, social sorting among Republicans works against the trend. Instead, I find rival-party feelings grow colder across all Democrats, whether white or black, religious or secular, rich or poor; a process I call fortification. Among Republicans, there is evidence suggesting the trend is driven mostly by white partisans rather than those of color; a process I call entrenchment.
Cite
Kristinn Már, Partisan Affective Polarization: Sorting, Entrenchment, and Fortification, Public Opinion Quarterly, Volume 84, Issue 4, Winter 2020, Pages 915–935, https://doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfaa060
Kristinn Már Ársælsson 