Affective Polarization and the Willingness to Accept Democratic Transgressions

• Department of Political and Social Sciences

In the framework of the EUI Political Behaviour Colloquium, this seminar features a paper presentation by Fernand Braudel Fellow at the EUI Department of Political and Social Sciences, Dietlind Stolle.

Over the last decade, we have seen stable democracies being challenged as executives expand their power, a trend that was clearly magnified during the pandemic. In this paper, we ask a critical question: does affective polarization shape citizens’ willingness to condone such executive aggrandizement? Reluctant to see their opponent assuming power, polarized partisans may be willing to countenance the weakening of checks on the power of the executive in order to advantage their own party. We develop a series of theoretical conditions under which supporters of parties in multi-party systems might consider supporting executive aggrandizement. We investigate these propositions in a comparative sample of 17 European countries. 

This paper makes three important contributions. First, we develop a measure of affective polarization that is not only designed specifically for a multi-party context, but better captures the essence of affective polarization as mutual antipathy between the partisans of opposing parties. Second, we develop a six-item-battery of support for executive aggrandizement that taps into some of the most important aspects of democratic norm erosion (Svolik 2019). Finally, we lay out and test key mechanisms that may be driving an association between affective polarization and support for executive aggrandizement in multi-party contexts.

The speaker will be presenting in person. Participants can follow the talk from Sala del Capitolo, although space is restricted on a first-come, first-served basis to a maximum of 30 people. The talk will also be live-streamed and participants will receive the zoom link once registered.