Populism, ideology, and affective polarization: a comparative study of Argentina and Chile

In recent years, affective polarization has attracted much attention, particularly in reference to its potential negative effects on democracy. While affective polarization has mainly been studied in the two-party context of the United States (Iyengar et al. 2019), a growing number of studies have explored this phenomenon in multi-party systems around the world (for example, Boxell, Gentzkow, and Shapiro 2022; Gidron, Adams, and Horne 2020; Reiljan 2020; Torcal and Comellas 2022a; Wagner 2021 ) including Latin America (Carty 2020; Sendra and Bohigues 2022; Segovia 2022). However, our understanding of the factors and dynamics that drive this trend of affective polarization in this type of political system is still very limited, especially in contexts where multiple parties exist within two large ideological blocks. To explore this question, we propose a comparative analysis of the Argentine and Chilean cases. In the case of Chile, the two ideological blocks have long been present in the electoral arena (Constable and Valenzuela 1993) and have shaped political behavior (Olivares and Varas 2020). As such, in line with what has been observed in other democracies (Mason 2018a, 2018b; Vegetti and Širinić 2019), we expect that affective polarization should be driven by ideological identities. In Argentina, on the other hand, ideology has been less important for political behavior than other factors, such as partisan identity and populism(Calvo 2019; Calvo and Murillo 2012; Gervasoni and Tagina 2019; Schiumerini 2019; Sendra and Llamazares 2022; Ratto and Montero 2015), a tendency not uncommon in other Latin American democracies. Although in recent elections in Argentina there has been a left- and a right-oriented ideological block, these formed recently for electoral convenience (Tagina 2013 and 2018). We therefore expect to find different types of identities driving affective polarization in these two contexts - ideological identities in Chile and partisan or populist identities in Argentina. We will conduct our analyses using data from the TRI-POL three-wave panel survey carried out between September 2021 and March-April 2022 (Torcal et al. 2022).