Affect or Emotions? Disaggregating Affective Polarisation to Explain Support for Liberal Democracy in Belgium and the United Kingdom

Abstract

While democratic support remains robust, support for liberal-democratic institutions has markedly declined across established democracies. Affective polarisation features prominently in theoretical accounts of this erosion, yet empirical investigations yield contradictory findings. This study posits that such inconsistencies stem from conceptual and measurement limitations in conventional operationalisations of affective polarisation. Drawing on an original survey experiment in Belgium and the United Kingdom (N = 2000), I advance a multidimensional approach transcending political parties to examine polarisation across a salient societal cleavage (“wokeness”) while differentiating between dislike, social distance, and negative emotions. My analysis yields three contributions: first, conventional measures of affective polarisation demonstrate limited explanatory capacity regarding liberal-democratic support: if anything, they are weakly positively related to support for liberal democracy. Second, negative emotional responses towards a specified actor consistently relate to diminished liberal-democratic support across all experimental conditions and national contexts. Third, dislike and social distance directed specifically towards anti-democratic actors relate to more liberal-democratic support (and vice versa), revealing the crucial importance of taking into account the standpoint on democracy by those whom respondents polarise against. These findings invite theoretical reconsideration of affective polarisation’s relationship with democracy and empirical reoperationalisation of the measure of affective polarisation.