A growing body of literature suggests that negative partisanship, voters’ aversion of a political party, increasingly shapes political competition. Recent works have provided important empirical evidence that, to many voters, negative partisanship can go beyond a mere “dislike” of the party, constituting an independent and consequential social identity. However, we still know relatively little about the roots of negative identification as a sui generis concept, uncoupled from positive partisanship and negative evaluations of political parties (“party disdain”). I tackle this gap by asking two questions. First, why are some individuals repelled by a party but attracted to none (“pure” negative partisans)? Second, what turns mere dislike of a party into a salient social identity formed against it? I pursue these goals by leveraging a 9-country survey containing appropriate measures of party identification and affective evaluations, which allow me to delineate the different profiles of negative partisans in their full complexity. Preliminary findings can be summarised as follows. Pure negative partisans are numerous across the 9 sampled countries, especially in multi-party systems; they differ from non-partisans primarily due to higher levels of political interest, though their levels of out-party dislike surpass those of other types of partisans (“hardcore” and positive partisans). Further, the “step” between dislike and negative identification is seemingly not linear, with many individuals holding a negative identity with relatively mild out-party dislike. Amongst negative identifiers, cultural – but not economic – issue distance is consistently associated with negative identification, with tentative evidence suggesting this stems from misperceptions of the out-party’s ideology. Put together, these findings indicate that party disdain and negative identification can be systematically disentangled, and that negative identities may be a result of disagreement over issues closer to one’s own self-concept. As politics becomes increasingly personal and negative, this paper provides an important avenue in understanding the nature of political identities and how they contribute to extant polarising divides in democratic politics.
