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Research project

INFOREPOL - Informing voters, reducing affective polarisation: an experimental informative hub for the 2025 Polish presidential elections

This project has received funding via the EUI Widening Programme call 2025. 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 Widening countries, and thus foster a more cohesive European Higher Education and Research area.

The INFOREPOL project aims to address the intensifying problems of misinformation and affective polarisation in Europe, focusing on the upcoming 2025 Polish presidential elections. Affective polarisation – broadly defined as the mutual antipathy between different political camps in society – is a concept that has received increasing attention lately, following the seminal work of Iyengar et al. (2012). Affective polarisation is considered to have problematic ramifications both vertically, as it has been associated with democratic backsliding across the world, and horizontally as it leaks into the social sphere, causing discrimination toward fellow citizens with different political affiliations.

Research in the United States has already developed and tested several strategies to mitigate affective polarisation. Correcting misperceptions about the political out-groups has proven to be one of the most promising interventions: people tend to think that their political opponents are ideologically more extreme than they actually are, and if these misperceptions are corrected, animosity towards them drops significantly. This problem is especially relevant in the current era of social media echo chambers and rampant spread of misinformation.

Such efforts to reduce partisan animosity remain scarce in Europe, which is troubling considering the severe consequences of this phenomenon. Poland constitutes a highly suitable case to address this research gap, as it has simultaneously experienced increasing affective polarisation, democratic backsliding, and decreasing social solidarity. Moreover, given the enduring two-party dominance and sharp ideological divisions, it is likely that Polish voters have developed misperceptions about their political opponents. Therefore, this research project aims to expand the existing, mostly US-based, research to Poland, seeking to address the following research question: can correcting misperceptions about political opponents reduce affective polarisation in society? 

INFOREPOL seeks to achieve several objectives, academic and societal alike:

  1. Develop and test digital interventions aimed at correcting partisan misperceptions and reducing affective polarization;
  2. Contribute to the academic understanding of affective polarisation and the ways to reduce it in the currently understudied European context;
  3. Inform (potential) voters, policymakers, and civil society actors about the positions of the presidential candidates with non-biased scientifically grounded data; 
  4. Provide a reliable dataset on the Polish presidential candidates’ policy positions, contributing to the understanding of the polish political space.

 

For more information about the EUI Widening Europe Programme, please visit the official webpage.

The team

Group members

External Partners

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