CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2021
| Author | Van Der Veen, Olaf |
|---|---|
| Title | Political Polarisation Compared: Creating a Comprehensive Index of Political Polarisation |
| Summary | Political polarisation is a very pressing political issue, as it can worsen democracy and has been rising in many countries in the past two decades. However, the exact scope of the problem is unclear, because conflicting measurements and conceptualisations have created disagreement about which countries are polarised. Scholars usually pick one ‘type’ of polarisation (ideological, affective) and measure that type, even though multiple are salient to the concept. Furthermore, little comparative data is available that measures multiple types of political polarisation at once. This thesis aims to rectify both of these problems by creating a comparative measure of political polarisation that incorporates multiple types. This thesis first conceptualises political polarisation as a four-dimensional concept, operating through ideological and affective aspects and at the mass and elite levels. Then, it creates a comparative index that uses multinational surveys to measure all four types in more than 100 countries and over 25 years, using survey questions and transformations common in the scholarly literature. This thesis finds that the index mostly aligns with scholarly expectations when countries have much scholarly consensus on their polarisation levels; that the United States has spiked in the past 5 years, whereas Poland and the United Kingdom have not; and that polarisation in general has not uniformly risen, but that instead elite types have risen while mass types have oscillated or declined. These results favour looking at the relationship between different types and specifying causes and solutions focused around particular types rather than viewing political polarisation as uniform. |
| Supervisor | Littvay, Levente |
| Department | Political Science MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2021/van-der-veen_olaf.pdf |
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