Research project CORRPOL - Corruption and affective polarisation: How party-level corruption perceptions drive partisan affect Print Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Send by email The EUI Widening Europe Programme initiative, backed by contributions from the European Union and EUI Contracting States, is designed to strengthen internationalisation, competitiveness, and quality in research in the so-called Widening countries, and thus foster a more cohesive European Higher Education and Research area. This project has been funded via the EUI Early Stage Researchers (ESR) call 2024 with the contribution of the Widening Europe Programme.Affective polarisation – broadly defined as mutual antipathy between different political camps in society – is cause for increasing concern throughout the democratic world. Several studies have found that ideological and affective polarisation are positively correlated with each other, but the overlap is not as strong as one would intuitively expect. The lack of alignment between these two forms of polarisation suggests the need to investigate other factors that can account for variations in affective polarisation. Country-level explanatory models tend to underestimate the levels of affective polarisation in Central and Eastern Europe (and to a somewhat lesser extent in Southern Europe) compared to Western Europe. Higher levels of corruption in Eastern and Southern European countries compared to Western Europe may be the missing link.In this project, we will test a hypothesis that corruption perceptions play an important role in driving partisan hostility. We devise a survey experiment in two European countries in which we vary the parties’ ideological placement, specific issue stance, and involvement in corrupt practices. This approach allows us to disentangle the effects of each variable on affective polarisation. Our findings will thus strengthen the currently inconclusive scholarly knowledge about the underlying foundations of this troubling phenomenon.