The Political "Other" in People’s Own Words: Stereotype Domains and Affective Polarisation in Brazil and the Netherlands

Affective polarisation is not only a matter of how much people dislike political opponents, but also how they mentally represent them. Political stereotypes, beliefs about attributes of politically-defined camps, provide the cognitive raw material that can make hostility feel warranted, by depicting opponents as a coherent “type” with suspect motives, character, or social composition. Yet we still know little about which kinds of stereotypes citizens spontaneously draw on, why they differ across individuals, and whether certain stereotype domains are more tightly connected to hostility, especially outside the United States. We address this gap with novel open-ended survey data from the Netherlands (N≈2,000) and Brazil (N≈3,000), allowing us to observe citizens’ spontaneous images of political out-groups “in their own words”. We analyse responses to an open-ended question asking respondents to list words or characteristics that come to mind when thinking about the voters of their least-liked party, employing a novel classification framework that enables coherent comparison across contexts. In doing so, this paper makes four contributions to debates on affective polarisation. First, we map and compare the repertoire of spontaneous political stereotypes in the Netherlands and Brazil, documenting which domains dominate citizens’ everyday images of political opponents and what those images contain. Second, drawing on insights from psychology and political behaviour research, we develop a theoretical framework that explains why individuals vary in the domains they reach for, i.e. why some think in terms of policy conflict, others in terms of social composition, and others in moralised trait judgements. Third, we leverage contextual differences between the Dutch and Brazilian party systems to assess how political competition structures stereotype content and domain use. Fourth, we test whether the domain(s) respondents spontaneously employ differentially predict hostility towards out-voters. By shifting attention from experimentally induced stereotypes to spontaneously expressed ones, this paper clarifies both the origins of political stereotyping and how everyday mental images of political opponents may contribute to affective polarisation.