CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2021
| Author | Szabó, Miklós |
|---|---|
| Title | The Effect of Affective Polarization and Partisan Affect on Political Participation in the United States |
| Summary | This thesis investigates the effect of affective polarization on political participation by analyzing the most recent available dataset of American National Election Studies from the 2020 U.S. Presidential Elections. While scarce research on the topic showed the positive effect of affective polarization on turnout, what has not yet been explored is whether dimensions of affective polarization – namely in-party and out-party affect – contribute to the effect evenly or one is more dominant than the other. Moreover, previous studies have operationalized political participation by turnout, not taking forms of non-voting participation into account. Hence, to address these gaps, this thesis employs statistical analysis to assess affective polarization’s effect on both voting and non-voting participation and to compare the strength of in-party and out-party affect’s effects. Results of binominal logistic and ordered logit regression modeling confirm that while affective polarization is positively associated with participation and both dimensions contribute to this effect, out-party evaluation has a stronger effect and higher explanatory power. The empirical analysis reveals that one unit decrease in out-party affect has four times larger effect on voting and five times larger effect on non-voting participation than a corresponding increase in in-party affect. This disparity indicates that the effect of affective polarization on participation is more driven by out-party affect. Therefore, the study contributes to the existing literature by pointing out that affective polarization’s affiliation to participation is dependent not only on the difference, but also on the actual value of in-party and out-party affect and suggests directions for further research. |
| Supervisor | Tóka, Gábor |
| Department | Political Science MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2021/szabo_miklos.pdf |
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