About 10 years ago, political scientist James Adams saw something troubling. New polls asked Americans whether they agreed or disagreed that people in the opposing political party weren’t simply wrong but evil. Nearly half of people from both political parties agreed.
The responses didn’t surprise him. Adams studies political polarization measured by how people feel about others in their own and opposition political parties. By those measures, sharpening negativity had been growing since at least the 1990s and continues today.
Since then, Adams has been at the frontier of more detailed measures of polarization that show not only how people feel about those in opposition parties but what drives those feelings. His research gives some insights on what might change the course of the nation.
“If you use your eyes and your ears you can't miss just how toxic this political environment is today,” said Adams, a professor of political science in the College of Letters and Science at 鶹ý. “We really need to be careful in the same way that if someone is barreling down the highway at 100 miles an hour at midnight in a rainstorm with one of the headlights out.”
Polarization in the U.S. is not what it used to be
The term “polarization" used to be a way to describe political disagreements that take place without undermining people’s basic respect for each other. “Affective polarization” is different. Affective polarization is how political scientists describe anger, distrust, contempt, hostility and even hatred across party lines.
“Affective polarization is about feelings, and in particular it's about very negative, frankly nasty, feelings that people have for the other side,” said Adams.
The first measures of affective polarization that date back to the 1980s are based on surveys that asked people how they felt about their own and opposing political parties. This type of measure is called a “feeling thermometer scale.”
Adams said that negative feelings have always existed in American politics, but thermometer scores today are the lowest they have ever been in the nearly 50 years since the measure existed.
Adams wondered, are Americans unique in their political division?
American political polarization in an international context
In their book, American Affective Polarization in Comparative Perspective (), Adams and his co-authors Noam Gidron, from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Will Horne, from Princeton University, compared affective polarization in the U.S. against 19 other western democracies. Their analysis covers over 80 national election surveys between 1996 and 2017.
The analysis found that affective polarization in the U.S. is not a complete outlier compared with other Western democracies. Out of the 20 countries in this study, the U.S. ranked eighth in affective polarization but fourth in opposition-party dislike.