The Polarizing Effect of Political Attacks: How Elite Discourse Fuels Affective Polarization

While a growing body of research connects affective polarization to political elites’ rhetoric, particularly their use of attacks (e.g., Neyazi et al., 2023; Wilson et al., 2020), little is known about how different types of attacks shape affective polarization and through which psychological mechanisms. Addressing this gap in a multi-party context, this study varies both the direction of political attacks (in-party attacking an out-party, or vice versa) and the ideological distance between in- an out-parties attacking each other. More concretely, using a novel preregistered experimental design in Belgium, we first examine if and to what extent in- and out-party attacks increase affective polarization, by analyzing changes in in-party love and out-party hate. Second, we investigate the psychological mechanisms underlying the effects, focusing on three potential mediators: perceived symbolic threat, reflecting a sense of fear (when an out-party attacks the in-party), perceived in-group agency, reflecting a sense of pride (when the in-party attacks an out-party), and moral outrage, reflecting a sense of anger (again, when an out-party attacks the in-party, or a backlash effect when the in-party attacks an out-party). Third, we analyze if and how these effects are moderated by party identity strength and subjective ideological closeness to the targeted parties. Overall, drawing on experimental data that is currently being collected, this study aims to contribute to the growing literature on elite-driven affective polarization by disentangling the psychological pathways through which political attacks shape partisan animosity. This way, it seeks to provide a more nuanced understanding of how elite discourse fuels political divisions in multi-party contexts.