Persistent polarization: The unexpected durability of political animosity around US elections

2024/09/04 by Neil Fasching, Shanto Iyengar, Yphtach Lelkes +1 · 1 voice · 5 citations
Social Sciences · #Electoral Systems and Political Participation #Populism, Right-Wing Movements #Social Media and Politics

paper · pdf · doi:10.1126/sciadv.adm9198

openalex publication_date 2024/09/04 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/19

Abstract

The scholarly literature suggests that, as elections approach, political tensions intensify, and, as they pass, tensions return to pre-election levels. Using a massive new dataset of 66,000 interviews (cross-sectional and panel), we find that animosities are durable and consistent over the course of the 2022 US election. Individuals with more exposure to the campaign tend to be more polarized, and this sentiment endures post-election. Contrary to expectations, partisans who voted for the winning candidate are no less polarized post-election than those on the losing side. In closing, we note that the durability of polarization has important implications not only for our understanding of the scope of partisan divides but also for efforts designed to ameliorate polarization.

Citations

• Robust Nonparametric Confidence Intervals for Regression-Discontinuity Designs
• Affect, Not Ideology
• Expressive Partisanship: Campaign Involvement, Political Emotion, and Partisan Identity
• The Limits of Partisan Prejudice
• The Economic Consequences of Partisanship in a Polarized Era
• Electoral Cycle Fluctuations in Partisanship: Global Evidence from Eighty-Six Countries
• Status threat, not economic hardship, explains the 2016 presidential vote
• What Do We Measure When We Measure Affective Polarization?
• Are there Still Limits on Partisan Prejudice?
• Party Competition and Cooperation Shape Affective Polarization: Evidence from Natural and Survey Experiments in Israel
• Paper Cuts: How Reporting Resources Affect Political News Coverage
• The Stability of Immigration Attitudes: Evidence and Implications
• Does Affective Polarization Undermine Democratic Norms or Accountability? Maybe Not
• The Origins and Consequences of Affective Polarization in the United States
• How Much Should We Trust Estimates from Multiplicative Interaction Models? Simple Tools to Improve Empirical Practice

Cited by

• Election Outcomes and Affective Polarization in the United States
• Contingent Confidence: The Effect of the 2024 Election Outcome on Public and Elite Confidence in National Elections
• Conflict on the campaign trail? How campaign effort and electoral competitiveness shape affective polarization
• Identity after the ballot: How winning and losing impact partisan attachments and affective polarization
• Toward a more empathic, connected, and humanizing democracy: A civics curriculum centering listening and storytelling

Discussions

• Supporters of winning and losing campaigns exhibit similar levels of polarization after the election, showing that pre-election polarization levels are not increased/ reduced by electoral outcomes, fi [bsky, 13 points, 0 comments]

Related

• Election Outcomes and Affective Polarization in the United States
• Mass Polarization: Manifestations and Measurements
• Affective polarization is uniformly distributed across American States
• A Flexible Measure of Voter Polarization
• The Origins and Consequences of Affective Polarization in the United States