Working with a national U.S. sample and data collected from our work with the nonprofit bridging organization Living Room Conversations, we counter the assertions of conflict profiteers. People in the U.S. are far less polarized than imagined, there is a great deal of trust in the election system, and a subsequent “reveal” strategy of this common ground thus becomes as, if not more, important than the need to “bridge” imagined chasms between citizens. With this strategy in place, those interested in or involved with bridging can further set the conditions for democratic dialogue by designing interventions that involve more and different kinds of people in their work, focusing on long-term impacts, and stretching definitions of participation from dialogue to civic action.

Members of the majority party in Congress sometimes vote against bills that they prefer over the status quo. We estimate a model of congressional roll-call voting that allows for this kind of non-ideological protest voting. We find that protest voting has significant implications for roll-call-based estimates of ideology and other analyses that rely upon them. For example, a traditional item response theory model curiously identifies members of the Squad as relatively moderate Democrats, but our protest-voting-adjusted scores identify them as the most liberal members of Congress. We also find that previous studies may have underestimated responsiveness, the effects of ideology in elections, the utility of non-roll-call-based measures of ideology, and the increase in congressional polarization. Although the implications for most substantive applications are likely modest, our analyses suggest that future researchers can better measure legislative ideology by accounting for a small number of non-ideological votes.

We examine the relationship between partisan social media messages and voters’ support for undemocratic transgressions against the president and Congress. Our survey experiments in Brazil, Chile, and Colombia randomly exposed respondents to partisan messages about contentious and consensus issues such as inflation, abortion, crime, and protests. We then assessed whether these messages increased support for undemocratic transgressions. Our findings reveal distinct inter-party differences: opposition voters were more inclined to support presidential impeachment, while incumbent voters were more predisposed to dissolve Congress. However, contrary to our initial pre-registered hypotheses, exposure to partisan social media messages did not consistently augment these tendencies. This implies that while voters often endorse undemocratic measures in line with their partisan leanings, such preferences are not heightened by exposure to partisan discourse on social media.

Scholars and political observers, alike, have associated political polarization with the weakening of democratic norms and the undermining of accountability, as partisans trade off the public interest against in-group loyalty. We probe how in-group bias shapes support for collective goods in actual high-stakes settings in an especially polarized democracy. Conducting survey experiments in Poland, we examine two scenarios: electoral integrity during the 2023 parliamentary election that could have entrenched authoritarian rule and national security after Russia’s 2022 invasion of neighboring Ukraine. Our findings show pronounced partisan bias undermining support for electoral integrity – approximately 40 per cent of party supporters with an average level of partisanship supported rerunning an election when their party unexpectedly lost – but less bias in judgments about national security, raising the possibility that individuals may view democracy as more of an instrumental than an intrinsic good.

Conspiratorial thinking is an indelible part of American politics; indeed, conspiracy theories proliferated in North America even before the founding of the United States. A current headwind of trends appears to facilitate a surge in conspiratorial thinking, including the increased spread and accessibility of misinformation, steady declines in public trust in authority figures, and an increasingly polarized electorate marked by mutual partisan animosity. The annual symposium of the UC Irvine Center for Neuropolitics brought together experts in law, political science, neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology to discuss why and how conspiracy thought develops and persists. This paper synthesizes the insights from that symposium, addressing the foundations of conspiracy thinking in both individuals and society as a whole, and its place in the current American political landscape. Through integrating various disciplinary perspectives, the symposium aimed to identify possible pathways to alleviating the prevalence and influence of conspiratorial thinking.

In recent decades, support for the far right has surged in many countries. One common explanation for this is that far-right support is a backlash against left-wing governments and their policies. We investigate the causal effect of the partisan make-up of governments on the electoral results of far-right parties. Evidence from over-time comparative data and a quasi-experimental analysis based on a regression discontinuity design in Spain indicates that far-right parties benefit electorally when the current government is on the left. In further analyses, we employ a novel regression discontinuity design (RDD)-based sampling strategy to examine original individual-level survey data from Spanish municipalities close to the discontinuity cutoff. These data show that the likely mechanism underlying the backlash effect is an ideological shift to the right among the electorate when left-wing parties govern. Overall, the far right benefits more when the mainstream left governs than when the mainstream right does.

The increased salience of environmental concerns, first and foremost global warming, is one of the key developments of contemporary Western European politics. Still, the effects of global warming issues on electoral outcomes, party competition and polarization remain poorly understood. Our article shows how the construction of wind turbines fuels conflict between its key proponents and opponents, Green and populist radical right parties. Contention over the issue contributes to the electoral success of both sides and therefore reinforces the new central divide between them. Drawing on a novel dataset, we investigate the impact of the construction of wind turbines on Alternative für Deutschland and Green party electoral success in Germany. We employ a two‐way fixed effects model, where the construction of wind turbines functions as the independent variable. We show that the construction of wind turbines boosts the electoral support of both their biggest supporters and their biggest opponents. Our results have important implications for understanding contemporary political conflict in Western Europe such as the electoral rise of the Greens and the populist radical right, the importance of issue salience and the polarization of party systems.

Research on government formation in parliamentary democracies has presented contradicting evidence on the role of political veto institutions and parliamentary polarization on the formation of cabinet types. Institutional rules may either provide significant leeway for political parties or seriously constrain them when forming sustainable coalitions. In contrast to previous studies we argue that the effect of political institutions is conditional on the degree of polarization in parliament. We test our hypotheses using original data on 842 cabinet formations in 33 advanced democracies between 1945–2018. In line with previous research, we find that the institutional rules have a pronounced effect on the type of cabinet formed, but that institutional rules moderate the effect of party system polarization. Thus, our findings provide important new insights on cabinet formation which are particularly relevant for today's increasingly polarized parliaments.

As political polarization increases across many of the world's established democracies, many citizens are unwilling to appreciate and consider the viewpoints of those who disagree with them. Previous research shows that this lack of reflection can undermine democratic accountability. The purpose of this paper is to study whether empathy for the other can motivate people to reason reflectively about politics. Extant studies have largely studied trait‐level differences in the ability and inclination of individuals to engage in reflection. Most of these studies focus on observational moderators, which makes it difficult to make strong claims about the effects of being in a reflective state on political decision making. We extend this research by using a survey experiment with a large and heterogeneous sample of UK citizens (N = 2014) to investigate whether a simple empathy intervention can induce people to consider opposing viewpoints and incorporate those views in their opinion about a pressing political issue. We find that actively imagining the feelings and thoughts of someone one disagrees with prompts more reflection in the way that people reason about political issues as well as elicits empathic feelings of concern towards those with opposing viewpoints. We further examine whether empathy facilitates openness to attitude change in the counter‐attitudinal direction and find that exposure to an opposing perspective (without its empathy component) per se is enough to prompt attitude change. Our study paints a more nuanced picture of the relationship between empathy, reflection and policy attitudes.

Building on research on cultural threat‐induced polarization, we investigate the effect of the individual‐level salience of cultural threats on polarization between social liberals and conservatives. In a unique survey experiment conducted with 129,000 respondents nested in 208 regions in 27 European Union (EU) member states, we manipulate the presence of two cultural threats, women's rights, and refugee immigration, to test their polarizing effects on social liberals’ and social conservatives’ support for traditional values. We find that priming the threat of refugee immigration polarizes conservatives and liberals equally. Yet, introducing the salience of women's rights leads to lower preferences for traditional values, particularly among more liberal respondents. Our findings demonstrate: 1) the study of backlash should distinguish individuals by their predisposition to backlash, rather than studying the population as a whole; and 2) social conservatives’ backlash should be studied conjointly with social liberals’ counter‐reactions to backlash. Future research may investigate why different cultural threats provoke different reactions.

Why have some territories performed better than others in the fight against COVID‐19? This paper uses a novel dataset on excess mortality, trust and political polarization for 165 European regions to explore the role of social and political divisions in the remarkable regional differences in excess mortality during the first wave of the COVID‐19 pandemic. First, we investigate whether regions characterized by a low social and political trust witnessed a higher excess mortality. Second, we argue that it is not only levels, but also polarization in trust among citizens – in particular, between government supporters and non‐supporters – that matters for understanding why people in some regions have adopted more pro‐healthy behaviour. Third, we explore the partisan make‐up of regional parliaments and the relationship between political division – or what we refer to as ‘uncooperative politics’. We hypothesize that the ideological positioning – in particular those that lean more populist – and ideological polarization among political parties is also linked to higher mortality. Accounting for a host of potential confounders, we find robust support that regions with lower levels of both social and political trust are associated with higher excess mortality, along with citizen polarization in institutional trust in some models. On the ideological make‐up of regional parliaments, we find that, ceteris paribus, those that lean more ‘tan’ on the ‘GAL‐TAN’ spectrum yielded higher excess mortality. Moreover, although we find limited evidence of elite polarization driving excess deaths on the left‐right or GAL‐TAN spectrums, partisan differences on the attitudes towards the European Union demonstrated significantly higher deaths, which we argue proxies for (anti)populism. Overall, we find that both lower citizen‐level trust and populist elite‐level ideological characteristics of regional parliaments are associated with higher excess mortality in European regions during the first wave of the pandemic.

Can territorial disputes within countries be a basis for affective polarization? If so, how does it vary across territories? A burgeoning literature on affective polarization has largely focused on partisan divisions; we argue that contentious political issues such as those relating to territorial integrity can also be a basis for such affective polarization, where citizens feel concord with those sharing such policy preferences and animus for those who do not. We specify hypotheses about territorial‐policy‐based affective polarization and bring comparative survey evidence from three European regions with salient and contentious territorial claims: Scotland, Catalonia and Northern Ireland. While these three cases encompass different outcomes of territorial disputes, our results show strikingly similar levels of affective polarization.

The literature on democratization uses measures of either ethnic fractionalization or polarization in empirical analyses on the causes of democratic regress; some authors have argued that either of the two complicates democratization. This article detects a conceptual puzzle in this use of the two concepts: when we shift the attention from fractionalization to polarization we are not simply moving along a continuum but rather making an epistemic leap from facts to normative problems. But to treat the relation between a descriptive account of a state of affairs and a normative status as a continuum is a fallacy that remains unaddressed in this literature. This article exposes the limits of analyses that remove normative considerations from the big picture of dynamics of democratization and that narrow their focus to case histories of democratic development. It pleas for a return to normative insight and interdisciplinary dialogue.