Partisan Hearts,Polarized Minds? Revisiting the Relationship Between Partisanship and Polarization

Abstract

Existing scholarship has increasingly recognized that strong partisanship does not inevitably produce out-party hostility—yet the scope and consistency of this decoupling across multiple measures of affective polarization remains underexamined. In this study, we revisit the relationship between partisan strength and affective polarization using original national survey data across three established measures: feeling thermometers, trait attributions, and social distance. We provide systematic, multi-measure evidence that the empirical linkage between partisan strength and out-party hostility is weaker and more heterogeneous than much of the literature implies. Substantial variation in out-party hostility exists at every level of partisan strength—even among the strongest partisans. We further show that ideological and issue-attitude strength meaningfully predict which strong partisans become most hostile toward the out-party. These results extend prior work by demonstrating that the decoupling of partisanship and hostility is robust across measurement approaches, and they highlight the importance of distinguishing partisanship’s constructive democratic functions from its corrosive forms.