Affective polarization from a citizens’ perspective: beyond party lines and feelings of dislike

The aim of this paper is to broaden the understanding of affective polarization by examining how its affective and polarization components are expressed by citizens, beyond existing electoral and ideological categorizations. The deepening divisions and heightened emotions in today's political landscape have made the concept of polarization increasingly prominent. However, current research on affective polarization, defining the concept as the degree of negative feelings that partisan groups hold toward each other, has tended to focus narrowly on a limited range of emotions and groups of concern (i.e.: political parties). This dominant trend in the literature on affective polarization has led to a dual gap that this paper seeks to fill. This paper proposes to contribute to ongoing debates and conceptualizations of affective polarization by delving deeper into 1) the emotional dimensions of the concept and 2) by identifying the groups between whom polarization occurs. Drawing on focus group discussions held in Belgium between 2019 and 2021, and based on qualitative content analysis, this paper investigates what affective polarization looks like in citizens’ own words, exploring categories and identities that are mobilized and the antagonisms and divisions that emerge. As a first step, the paper unpacks the emotional complexity of affective polarization. In particular, our paper shows that beyond the cold-warm understanding of affective polarization, and beyond the notion of “dislike”, there is a broad and more complex range of emotions (anger, fear, hope, etc.) which are key to understand how political groups feel toward each other, and how divisions grow. Our paper also shows the variety of social and political groups between whom polarization actually occurs. Here, our preliminary results indicate that, just like “politics” entails more than electoral politics, the divisions and conflicts underlying affective polarization go beyond ideological and party lines. In fact, our analysis shows that the distinction between political parties is nearly absent from citizens’ categorizations and group identification. Instead, other categories proved to be more fertile for polarization, such as rich/poor, young/old, Flemish/Walloon, as well as more particular categories related to everyday experiences, specific practices and places of reference. Together, our findings challenge conventional understandings of affective polarization by going beyond simple dislike measures of political partisanship, and by examining a broad range of emotions felt toward various political groups. Importantly, our findings suggest that in order to better understand affective polarization, more research into citizens’ own perspectives and feelings toward other groups in society is needed. This qualitative approach allows for a better grasp of the multiple forms of affective polarization and opens new perspectives to enrich its conceptualization.