Seminar series

Territorial affective polarisation: concept, measurement, and prevalence

Add to calendar 2023-04-13 14:00 2023-04-13 16:00 Europe/Rome Territorial affective polarisation: concept, measurement, and prevalence Seminar Room 2 Badia Fiesolana YYYY-MM-DD

Scheduled dates

Apr 13 2023

14:00 - 16:00 CEST

Seminar Room 2, Badia Fiesolana

Organised by

Department of Political and Social Sciences

In the framework of the Swiss Chair Seminar Series, this session features a presentation by Amuiz Garmendia Madariaga.

Federations and decentralised countries divide their geography and people into autonomous territorial units. These units are different in a number of (interdependent) dimensions and the historical development of these asymmetries shape the territorial coexistence in these regimes. In fact, by building communities of individuals with a sense of belonging to their unit, and a set of positive and negative feelings towards the rest, inter-unit sympathies and low profile rivalries become a defining feature of these countries. Yet, a rival unit might turn into an out-group when its members persistently prompt negative emotions and sentiments among the members of an in-group unit. We define as Territorial Affective Polarization (TAP) the extent to which citizens like people living in their unit more than people living in the rest of the territories. Moreover, we argue that this 'affect gap' might become a threat for the functioning of a decentralized democracy once these like-dislike dynamics politicise. Specifically, we contend that TAP might have corrosive effects for social coexistence when ideology and inter-territorial affection align. We develop an online survey experiment to capture the prevalence of this phenomenon, its variation, and effect on other individual attitudes. Our results suggest that, as the distance between the different territorial groups increases, federal and decentralised regimes might see their normative attributes challenged, and even, canceled.