Judged by association? How political group identities are used to infer negative impressions

Ideological differences and consequential dislike of political opponents are not inherently negative phenomena but arguably necessary features of democratic discourse and societal progress. Dislike, however, does become problematic when it is not based on real policy positions but on group identities. Previous research finds that politically formed in- and outgroups show an outgroup homogeneity effect, meaning a lower perceived variability of ideological positions among political opponents than among one's allies. Furthermore, such homogeneity perception is related to negative feelings towards the outgroup. I argue that this relationship can be explained by inference of negative impressions: The more homogenous the outgroup is perceived as, the more likely it is that negative encounters with individual outgroup members will affect attitudes towards other, formally unrelated outgroup members. Such an effect would imply evaluations of others that are not based on their actual policy positions or behaviour, but on associated identities. I test this mechanism through an experiment in which respondents are confronted with positive or negative impressions of a single outparty. Results are expected to show that a negative confrontation does not only affect attitudes towards that one outparty but, increasingly so with rising outgroup homogeneity perception, towards other outparties whose names were not mentioned to the respondent. Such findings give insight into the formation of affective polarization between identity based political groups and provide a starting point on how to direct political debates towards real positions instead of ascribed ones.