Smarty-Pants Vs Simpletons? Exploring Affective Polarisation Between Education-Based Groups

While most literature on affective polarisation tends to focus on political parties as primary groups to study the increasing affective distance between political groups and its consequences for democratic societies, education is often overlooked as a primary axis of social and political stratification. Although identification with educational status can be as strong as nationality or gender, its role in generating non-partisan affective polarisation remains under-researched. This is surprising, given that the meritocratic ideal which is dominant in Western societies today, generates "education-based bias," particularly among the highly educated who often perceive lower-educated citizens through a lens of individual responsibility and social stigma. This paper explores the link between education-based group identities and affective polarisation by looking at whether education-based groups generate meaningful affective polarisation. More specifically, we want to investigate how education-based groups perceive one another emotionally, and to what extent this is moderated by the broader political context, more specifically the extent to which political parties mobilize on these identities. By bridging sociology, social psychology and institutional political science, we hope to contribute to a deeper understanding of how educational stratification challenges democratic cohesion beyond the classical partisan focus dominant in AP research.