Work

A New Measure of Affective Polarization

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: Affective polarization has emerged as an important construct in the literature onpartisanship. However, most efforts to measure it have relied on simple pre-existingindices, potentially missing the complexity of affective polarization. In this article, weaddress these concerns by reconceptualizing and deriving a new measure of affectivepolarization. Drawing on the notion of political sectarianism from Finkel et al. (2020)and other lines of research in political behavior and social psychology, we develop andvalidate a novel multidimensional measure of affective polarization consisting of threeparts: othering, aversion, and moralization. Our analyses yield a valid and reliablenine-item measure with three subdimensions. These subdimensions and the full scalebroadly correlate with various measures of political identity, anti-democratic elite ac-tion, and political violence. Importantly, we find that the subdimensions have differentpatterns of correlation with key criterion variables, suggesting that othering, aversion,and moralization are distinct components of affective polarization.

Source: American Political Science Review

DOI: 10.1017/s0003055425000255

Authors: NICOLAS CAMPOS, CHRISTOPHER FEDERICO

Institution: University of Minnesota

Language: English

Topic: Electoral Systems and Political Participation

Subfield: Political Science and International Relations

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: hybrid

Estimated APC paid: $3,550

Funders: Psi Chi, University of Minnesota, Johns Hopkins University, University of Cambridge