Currently, two key themes of research are affective polarisation (AP) and resilience where the division caused polarisation is viewed as undermining the resilience necessary to recover from external adverse events such as economic shocks, pandemics and wars. To date, there has been relatively little research on the relationship between these two concepts. The relationship between political polarisation and resilience has mainly been conceptualised at the macro-level within the research literature. A key point here is that the macro-level idea of democratic resilience has been posited as a solution to pernicious political polarisation at the group and micro-levels (McCoy & Sumer 2021: 61-92). Specifically, countries with higher levels of polarisation have lower ‘democratic resilience’ which has been defined as ‘the capacity of an entity or system to resist to shocks, to absorb them, to bounce back from them and to move forward, in order to maintain or enhance its identity, if not structures and functions’ (Croissant & Lot 2024: 5). This definition is almost identical with individual-level definitions of resilience, which will be operationalised in this study using the Brief Resilience Scale (BRS, Smith et al. 2008). A validation study of a Czech version of BRS revealed that the scale has ‘good psychometric properties’ in terms of validity and reliability (Furstova, et al., 2021: 2810). Appraisal theory (AT), is a very useful theory in allowing resilience to be studied in terms of individuals’ management of stress (Lazarus 1991). The definition of stress is that it results from an interaction between a person and their (changing) external context thereby motivating resilience. AT predicts that external adverse events, motivating resilience, will activate negative emotions such as anger, fear and anxiety when personal goals are threatened. The expectation here is that individuals who are (1) angry should have lower BRS scores, and (2) those who are fearful or anxious will have higher ones. The negative emotions of anger, fear and anxiety also known to be linked with affective polarisation (Bakker & Lelkes, 2024). What is currently less clear is how negative emotions moderate or mediate the relationship between resilience and AP. Within AT one potential common link between resilience and AP is sense of unfairness. Experiencing unfairness is fundamentally emotional in nature, and is often linked to anger (Mikula, et al., 1998; Batson, et al., 2007; Srivastava, et al., 2009). However, unfairness is also associated with anxiety ‘because the incongruence between the pre-existing evaluation (i.e., pre-existing overall fairness judgment) and the actual treatment (unfair event) can create uncertainty about the future’ (Barclay & Kiefer, 2019, p. 1808). Consequently, the key idea to be tested in this paper is that a sense of unfairness generates negative emotions that generate the conditions for both resilience and AP, where those with low resilience (BRS scores) and more likely to be affectively polarised and vice versa. This exploration of how resilience and AP are linked through negative emotions will use Czech Attitude Barometer panel survey data which has indicators of AP, BRS and a range of emotions.
