# Affective Polarization **Affective polarization** is the tendency of partisans to **dislike, distrust, and avoid** members of the other party as *people* — a polarization of feeling and identity rather than of policy. It is the single most consequential strand of [[Polarization]] for democratic stability, and it has risen sharply in the United States since the 1980s even on questions where actual policy positions have not moved much farther apart. ## How it is measured The workhorse instrument is the **feeling thermometer** — survey respondents rate their warmth toward each party from 0 to 100. Affective polarization is the **gap** between in-party warmth (largely stable and positive) and out-party coldness (which has dropped steeply). Other measures: willingness to have one's child marry across party lines, trust in partisans as neighbors or employees, and attribution of negative traits ("selfish," "closed-minded") to the other side. By these measures Americans now express more hostility across party than across race. ## Why it happens The leading explanation, associated with Shanto Iyengar and colleagues, treats party as a **social identity** rather than a bundle of issue positions. Once partisanship fuses with other identities — religion, race, region, lifestyle (see [[Partisan Sorting]]) — the out-party becomes a threatening out-group, and ordinary social-identity dynamics (in-group favoritism, out-group derogation) do the rest. Lilliana Mason's work frames this as identity-based "uncivil agreement": people can hold similar views yet despise each other because the **team** matters more than the platform. A high-conflict media and social-media environment supplies constant out-group threat signals (see [[Media Theory Hub]]). ## Why it threatens democracy Affective polarization is the mass-level fuel of democratic erosion. When the other side is felt as an enemy rather than a rival, voters tolerate — even reward — norm-breaking by their own party as the lesser evil, dissolving the mutual toleration and forbearance that [[Steven Levitsky]] and [[Daniel Ziblatt]] identify as the load-bearing [[Democratic Norms]]. It also makes [[Negative Partisanship]] the dominant motive of the vote: people turn out less to support their own side than to defeat the hated other. ## KB Significance This is the concept that distinguishes "the parties disagree" from "the parties hate each other" — and it is the latter that the backsliding literature treats as dangerous. It connects [[Public Opinion]] (how attitudes are distributed) to the [[Populism]] friend-enemy frame and to the right-wing media ecosystem's business model of out-group threat. Tracking affective rather than purely ideological polarization is what keeps the KB's analysis precise about *why* American politics has become combustible. ## See Also - [[Polarization]] — the parent concept and its other strands. - [[Negative Partisanship]] · [[Partisan Sorting]] — the close cousins. - [[Democratic Norms]] · [[Political Behavior]]