Is polarization over and above norms?

• Department of Political and Social Sciences

In the framework of the EUI Political Behaviour Colloquium, this seminar features a paper presentation by EUI Visiting Student Isabel Rodríguez Marín (CSIC - Spanish National Research Council).

Previous studies have documented the primacy of partisan affective polarisation over other social cleavages (i.e. race, religion or ethnic identities) in western democracies. Partisan affective polarisation is understood as a form of hostility and prejudice that operates across political lines. It involves interpersonal evaluations and behaviours towards other individuals based on their political affiliation, and may result in social, political and economic discrimination. The question is why are people more polarised by partisanship than their regional, linguistic, ethnic or religious affiliations? An increasingly common answer is that interactions across race, religion, gender and other social divides are constrained by social norms, but there are no corresponding pressures or sanctions that prevent discrimination and hostility towards political opponents. Here, I present a research design to test this "lack-of-social-norms" hypothesis on political discrimination. The design involves laboratory experiments investigating the relationship between discriminatory behaviour and the perceived social inappropriateness of discrimination. Social appropriateness is measured using a standard social norms elicitation task. Our hypothesis is that participants will perceive it to be more socially inappropriate to discriminate on the basis of nationality or gender than on the basis of political identities. Correspondingly, we conjecture that participants will discriminate more in the political identity setting. 

In the laboratory, we will prime participants to think about particular dimensions of their identities. The priming aims to trigger a process of social identification by encouraging subjects to identify with some participants in their experimental session and not with others. In the decision-making phase of the experiment, we use a standard distribution game in which participants allocate a given amount of money between two potential recipients, one an individual sharing their primed identity (in-group), the other an individual not sharing their primed identity (out-group). Discrimination is defined as the extent to which individuals are willing to favour members of their own social group at the expense of the out-group. The dimension of identity that is primed is varied exogenously. A previous paper has used a similar design to compare a minimal-group-identity treatment with a nationality treatment. We aim at conducting treatments on other social identities, as well as on political identity. Experiments will be incentivized and, in a first phase, we will use a standard sample of registered participants. In the future, we plan to move to the field and conduct experiments with political activists to inquire whether norms about the social appropriateness of discrimination vary with the political engagement of the groups involved.