In recent years, political polarization has received considerable attention, not least as an explanation for developments in the United States.

Researchers and commentators have warned about what is known as affective polarization: that we are not only politically divided, but also dislike one another.

“Many have assumed that affective polarization leads to a range of negative consequences, such as intolerance and reduced support for democratic rules of the game. We wanted to find out whether this is actually true,” says Associate Professor and political scientist at the University of Bergen, Lars Erik Berntzen.

In a new study, he and his colleagues attempted to test this question directly, across nine democratic countries.

Measuring warm and cold feelings
Respondents were asked to rate how positive or negative their feelings were toward different political parties and their supporters on a scale from 0 to 100. The difference between how they rated “their” party and the party they liked the least became their polarization score.

“If, for example, I give my party 90 and the opposing party 10, I get a polarization score of 80,” Berntzen says.

The researchers then conducted a survey experiment to determine whether affective polarization leads to less democratic attitudes.

In the experiment, one third of the participants were told that research shows that people across political divides often have a lot in common. They were then asked to identify at least three such similarities themselves.

“This is a classic social psychological exercise, and we actually see that it works,” Berntzen says.

The exercise made people less negatively inclined toward their political opponents.

“It leads to a shift of between 3 and 10 points on a scale from 0 to 100. That is as much as polarization has increased in the United States over recent decades, so it is significant,” he says.

Yes, polarization is dangerous
Berntzen explains that once they succeeded in making people less “polarized,” they could also examine what polarization does to other democratic attitudes.

And the results were clear.

When polarization decreases, people become less willing to discriminate against political opponents, while support for democratic principles increases and willingness to engage in political compromise grows.

“We find a clear causal relationship. Polarization actually leads to greater political intolerance and weaker support for democratic norms. We establish that polarization indeed contributes to these attitudes, and we can conclude that too much polarization is dangerous,” Berntzen says.

Not the same everywhere
One country nevertheless stood out in the study: the United States.

There, the “depolarization experiment” had no effect.

“This is consistent with previous, similar studies of the phenomenon in the U.S. Several American researchers have concluded that affective polarization may not be so dangerous because this method does not work there. It may be that the level has become so high that polarization cannot be reduced in an experiment. But that does not mean that polarization in the U.S. is harmless, only that it is more difficult to study it in the same way,” Berntzen says.

He points out that much of the research in this field comes from the United States.

“American researchers have often used the U.S. as a model and generalized to the rest of the world. The United States has been used as a kind of standard model. We show that this can be misleading,” he says.