The Age of Political Sectarianism

In this paper we operationalize political sectarianism (Finkel et al., 2021), a new measurement of the current political divide that is composed of three core components: othering -the tendency to view anybody that doesn’t belong to one’s group as a basically different or alien-, aversion -the tendency to reject or dismiss those who are not part of the in-group- and moralization -the tendency to conceive of the others as morally wrong, perverse or insidious-, in Poland, Great Britain and Spain. For this purpose, we collect primary data in a survey that was carried out in these countries in December 2025. We argue that political sectarianism, rather than representing a new measure of affective polarization (Campos & Federico, 2025), constitutes a new (and unique) construct that improves the assessment of deep-seated divisions that are not captured by partisan competition among citizens in the three countries here analyzed. Therefore, we first classify respondents along a double axis of identity, one sociocultural one -based on attitudes towards migration, LGTBQ rights or gender equality- and another economic -based on attitudes towards economic redistribution or the free market-. Then, we use confirmatory factor analysis to test whether the three components of political sectarianism factor separately and are a reliable measure of our latent variable. Finally, we test whether political sectarianism is a better measure of support for democratic backsliding than affective polarization in Poland, Great Britain and Spain.