The 2025 Linz Rokkan Prize has been granted to Jona de Jong for his thesis Enduring Divides? Social Networks and the Entrenchment of Political Polarization. De Jong defended his dissertation on 31 October 2024, under the supervision of EUI Professors Hanspeter Kriesi and Arnout van de Rijt.
De Jong’s thesis studies whether two current forms of political polarisation – sociocultural conflict between citizens with and without tertiary education, and partisan animosity in the United States – represent enduring lines of division between cohesive social groups with strong identities, or should rather be seen as more shallow, ephemeral conflict that will not dominate politics for decades to come, let alone cause profound social and political division.
To assess the entrenchment of polarisation, the thesis introduces a relational approach, studying the importance people attribute to education levels and partisanship in relationship formation, the educational and partisan composition of social networks, and the degree to which social network homogeneity or heterogeneity exacerbates or moderates group-based political division.
The first two chapters show that educationally homogeneous social networks strengthen education-based political differences, suggesting persistent sociocultural conflict in Western democracies. The last two chapters show that partisanship matters little in the formation of social relationships, and that social networks remain politically heterogeneous, proposing that mass-level partisan animosity is not as severe as previously thought.
In their evaluation of the thesis, the committee praised the thesis’ major contribution to the areas of political polarisation, cleavages and dynamics of social networks, its novel relational approach and its rigorous and creative empirical work.
Upon receiving the prize, de Jong said: “I thank the committee for the nomination and am very happy to have received the award. My supervisors, Hanspeter Kriesi and Arnout van de Rijt, have been instrumental in the realisation of the thesis. I am grateful for their constant enthusiastic engagement with my work and for the example that their scholarship and supervisory style have set for me. I should also acknowledge the wider SPS research ecosystem as a great source of help and inspiration and – finally – the wonderful community of friends that have brightened my time in Florence.”
The Linz Rokkan Prize was instituted by the EUI Department of Political and Social Sciences (SPS) in honour of two great post-war political sociologists, the late Stein Rokkan and the late Juan Linz. The Prize is awarded annually for the best EUI thesis in a field of political sociology engaging with a theme in the broadly defined fields of work of Juan Linz and Stein Rokkan. It has been sponsored by Professor Richard Rose, one of the founding fathers of post-war political science in Europe.
Jona de Jong's thesis is available in Open Access in Cadmus, the EUI's research repository.