Abstract
This article compares the dynamics of polarization in the eleven case studies analyzed in this special issue to draw conclusions about antecedents of severe political and societal polarization, the characteristics and mechanisms of such polarization, and consequences of severe polarization for democracy. We find that the emergence of pernicious polarization (when a society is split into mutually distrustful “Us vs. Them” camps) is not attributable to any specific underlying social or political cleavage nor any particular institutional make-up. Instead, pernicious polarization arises when political entrepreneurs pursue their political objectives by using polarizing strategies, such as mobilizing voters with divisive, demonizing discourse and exploiting existing grievances, and opposing political elites then reciprocate with similarly polarizing tactics or fail to develop effective nonpolarizing responses. We explain how the political construction of polarization around “formative rifts” (social or political rifts that arise during the fundamental formation/reformation of a nation-state), the relative capacity of opposing political blocs to mobilize voters versus relying on mechanisms such as courts or the military to constrain the executive, and the strategic and ideological aims of the polarizing actors contribute to the emergence of its pernicious form. We analyze the consequences for democracy and conclude with reflections on how to combat pernicious polarization.
Polarized polities around the world are suffering democratic erosion. The articles in this volume analyze eleven case studies, showing how pernicious polarization—polarization that divides societies into “Us vs. Them” camps based on a single dimension of difference that overshadows all others—can occur in very diverse settings and produce harmful effects for democracy.
We recognize that political polarization is associated with both democratic strengthening and democratic erosion (Somer and McCoy 2018). Polarization can help to strengthen political parties and institutionalize party systems because it enables them to mobilize voters around identifiable differences. Offering voters clear choices and serving as heuristic cues can be helpful to democracy. Polarization is also potentially transformative in its capacity to address an imbalance in the popular vs. oligarchic versions of democracy (Slater 2013 and Stavrakakis 2018), or to open up a strong state as discussed by Somer in this volume. Democratic reform to enhance inclusion can be the goal when polarizing challengers organize to represent previously underrepresented groups. Polarization can thus serve democratization when used by political actors equipped with an inclusive agenda to contain polarization before it turns pernicious.
Even then, however, polarizing politics always carries the risk of taking on a life of its own, eviscerating cross-cutting ties and nonpartisan channels for compromise, and becoming pernicious. Polarizing challengers often provoke an elite backlash and counter-mobilization to stymie their transformative attempts, rather than a recognition of their reformist and inclusionary potential in building a constructively agonistic and pluralist democracy (Stavrakakis 2018). This elite backlash, in turn, can motivate the polarizing challengers to double down and strive to protect themselves by changing the rules and creating hegemonic power. Thus, whether polarization serves a constructive or destructive purpose for democracy depends on the behavior of both incumbents and oppositions, new political actors and traditionally dominant groups.
This collaborative project is focused on severe political and societal polarization, and moves beyond the conventional conceptualization of polarization as ideological distance between political parties and candidates. Instead, we are interested in situations in which people’s identities and interests line up along a single divide, one in which people form into political groups that are seen in a competitive, “either-or” relationship with each other, overshadowing people’s other, normally cross-cutting, identities. This pernicious state results from polarization’s tendency—if not contained—to make the “normal multiplicity of differences in a society increasingly align along a single dimension (where) cross-cutting differences become instead reinforcing, and people increasingly perceive and describe politics and society in terms of “Us” vs. “Them” (McCoy, Rahman and Somer 2018).
In this relational conceptualization, polarization has the tendency to extend from the partisan world to the realm of everyday social relations. In extreme cases, political identity can become all-encompassing as people view those in the “other” camp with distrust, suspicion, or fear, and cease to interact with them—even segregating themselves in their neighborhoods, social relationships, and news-feeds with like-minded people.
The dividing line between the camps may be simply support of, or opposition to, a personalistic political leader, such as pro- and anti-Trump in the United States, chavistas and anti-chavistas (for and against former president Hugo Chávez) in Venezuela, or pro- and anti-Erdoğan people in Turkey. But that dividing line may also reflect competing value systems (such as religious vs. secular), different visions of democracy (such as representative vs. participatory), or different definitions of citizenship and what rights should be afforded to immigrants. Group identity, which may act as a proxy or marker for the other aggregated divisions, is the key, linking citizens to a particular leader or partisan identity.
In this article, we compare our case studies in light of four basic questions. First, we examine how pernicious polarization emerges. Are there common antecedents of polarizing episodes in each country’s history, such as social cleavages, economic crises, or democratic experiences? Second, we explore the characteristics and dynamics of pernicious polarization in action.
Third, we ask how pernicious polarization impacts democratic institutions and norms. Here polarization shifts from the outcome we are trying to explain, and becomes the explanatory factor itself—the independent variable. In McCoy, Rahman, and Somer (2018), we envisioned four possible outcomes for democracy, three of them negative and one positive: i) government gridlock and governmental control that careen between the parties representing the two camps; ii) democratic erosion or backsliding under the new elites who have to come to power, as they gradually concentrate power and exclude prior dominant groups or dissenters; iii) democratic erosion or even collapse as old power groups reassert control; and iv) a more positive outcome of democratizing reform in response to democratic crises of careening or backsliding.
Finally, we compare our cases to see if any patterns emerge in the structural or institutional factors or even the specific nature of the polarization that might help us to predict which of these democratic outcomes could result in a given country.
Emergence of Pernicious Polarization
How do democracies move from normal competitive politics among adversaries with plural identities to pernicious polarization? Social scientists do not agree on the structural, institutional, agentic, and elite vs. mass-based causes of severe polarization (Bermeo 2003; Abramowitz 2010; Druckman, Peterson, and Slothuus 2013; Campbell 2018). Armed with our relational and political conceptualization of polarization and response, we first focus on the interaction of underlying social cleavages and grievances (that is, structural factors), and the strategies and discourse of political elites who politicize them (that is agentic factors). We then turn to institutional antecedents.
Structure vs. agency: Underlying cleavages and grievances and elite discourse
Enterprising political actors who understand the power of polarizing tactics often build on existing cleavages in a society to simplify and emphasize differences and help to build politically winning coalitions. But our cases show that polarization is not explained by the simple existence of underlying social cleavages. That is, underlying social cleavages are often present, but are not always the basis of polarization. Neither is their existence sufficient to predict when polarization occurs. Take ethnic and religious cleavages as an example. Zimbabwe with its identifiable ethnic cleavage did not consistently express political interests around those cleavages, and did not consistently experience political polarization. Poland, Hungary, and the Philippines, on the other hand, with more homogenous populations in terms of language, religion, and ethnicity, nevertheless experienced episodes of deep polarization. Therefore, we need to understand when and how social-political cleavages turn into pernicious polarization.
To examine the role of social and political cleavages in polarization, we distinguish between the salient discursive dimension of polarizations, and the underlying social and political cleavages. As we discussed in the introductory article to this volume, we refer to long-standing and deep-cutting divisions that either emerged or could not be resolved during the formation of nation-states, or, sometimes during fundamental re-formations of states such as during transitions from communism to capitalism, or authoritarian to democratic regimes, as “formative rifts.” Whenever polarization arises on the basis of a formative rift, we hypothesize that it is more likely to produce pernicious consequences for democracy.
Table 1 shows these dividing lines for each of our case studies. Some of the categories are actually empty signifiers, meaning that the speaker and the listener can assign whatever content they wish to the term. The populist rhetoric distinguishing the virtuous “people” from the conspiring “elite” is an excellent example of empty signifier (Hawkins et al 2018; Mudde and Kaltwasser 2018). For a populist, the “people” may refer to the “real Americans” or heartland supporters of Donald Trump, or the native-born Hungarians for supporters of Victor Orbán. The “elites” might be the establishment political parties, the more educated, the “deep-state” intelligence agencies and bureaucracy, Wall Street bankers, or foreign governments aligning with local opponents.
Discursive Dimensions of Polarization and Underlying Cleavages
In addition to the traditional social cleavages of class, religion, ethnicity, and geography, political cleavages can emerge based on issues or values. In polarized contexts, such cleavages are sometimes simplified to a “Left-Right” discourse, whose actual content varies from the traditional economic ideological scale (referring to the degree of intervention or regulation of the state in the economy) to the more cultural dimensions described in this volume by Vegetti for Hungary (cosmopolitan/nationalist; traditional/modern) or Rahman for Bangladesh (religious, linguistic, and ethnic definition of the nation). In some of our cases, a political ideology cleavage around the concept of democracy emerged: participatory (radical) vs. representative (liberal) democracy in Venezuela, or royal-elitist “Thai democracy” vs. majoritarian democracy in Thailand.
Polarization around formative rifts—those we predict to be most enduring and with pernicious outcomes—occurs in several of our cases. In three of the countries in this volume, the competing foundational myths about the nation and the state’s purpose, as described by LeBas and Munemo, centered on the legacy of the liberation wars and the actors claiming its legacy: ZANU and ZAPU in Zimbabwe, the ANC in South Africa, and Awami League in Bangladesh. In all three cases, the leaders of the anticolonialist liberation wars claimed a monopoly on the mantle of “liberation” and thus to serve as the true representatives of the people as nation, leading to democratic crises when challengers threatened that monopoly. Unresolved disputes over the basis of national identity further inflamed polarization in Bangladesh in the debate over whether religious identity or language/ethnicity should serve as the primary basis of national identity. Another kind of formative rift—“protean formative rift”—is evident in Turkey, described by Somer’s study in this volume. Here, the so-called center-periphery (Shils 1961; Mardin 1973) rift since the late Ottoman times on one hand produced “republican-centrist” narratives reflecting the values, identities, and institutional premises of the “center” (Somer 2014). These, for example, described who the heroes and villains were during the foundational periods of modernization and nation-state formation, and what should be the indispensable principles of the republic. On the other hand “conservative-revisionist” narratives emerged, which challenged many claims, if not the core, of the republican-centrist narrative. These two narratives more or less corresponded to the prosecular and proreligious political identities, respectively, which were not entirely mutually exclusive. Since the transition to multiparty politics in 1950, these competing narratives had not produced pernicious polarization until the parties adopted polarizing tactics around them in the 2000s and overcame the rough balance of power between the electoral majorities of center-right parties and the institutional dominance of a secular-republican ideology, particularly in the military and judiciary.
Finally, in the United States, the basic question of citizenship and who enjoys the rights espoused by the founding fathers—Thomas Jefferson’s “these truths” of political equality, natural rights, and sovereignty of the people (Lepore 2018)—has been debated since the founding of the republic and its differentiated citizenship for African slaves, Native Americans, and women. Subsequent divisions focused on birthright citizenship and naturalized citizenship. As Jill Lepore (2018) argues, at the heart of these conflicts is the dispute over the origin of truth, whether from God or the laws of nature. The deep polarization over these competing narratives of citizenship rights and roles of faith and reason led to a civil war, severe legal and informal discrimination for a century following the Civil War until the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and repolarization in the late-twentieth-century, which turned particularly rancorous during the Obama and Trump administrations.
Abramowitz and McCoy in this volume examine how racial resentment in the United States—responding to perceived unfair benefits or redress for historical legacies of discrimination—helps to explain voter realignment after the 1964 Civil Rights Act and to predict the vote for Trump in the 2016 U.S. elections. They further describe how Donald Trump’s candidacy “reinforced some of the deepest social and cultural divisions within the American electorate—those based on race and religion.” This feature of the current U.S. polarization that feeds off a formative rift creates a potential for pernicious polarization, which should worry democratic social and political actors from both sides of the aisles.
As is clear from the table, the discourse of polarization does not always match underlying social or political cleavages or formative rifts. Instead, polarizing actors more often seek to exploit grievances centered on political, economic, or cultural complaints; to activate latent resentments based on underlying cleavages and formative rifts; or bundle formative rifts together with other cross-cutting divisions. Mass grievances at the societal level are usually detectable and often exploited and exacerbated by elite political rhetoric. Polarizing speech articulates or even suggests a grievance, stoking fears, anxieties, and resentments that then become expressed as hostility, bias, and eventually enmity. By choosing the cleavage or grievance to highlight, political elites drive the polarization in important ways (Enyedi 2005; Lebas 2006).
We identify three primary types of grievances:
Political grievance or crisis of representation
Important segments of the population may perceive a lack of representation for a variety of reasons. They may have been actively excluded, such as blacks in apartheid South Africa or the American South prior to the civil rights era. Voters may also feel unrepresented if they perceive a lack of difference among colluding political parties viewed as either corrupt (i.e., too little polarization) or as unresponsive technocrats divorced from the people. For example, scholars have identified unresponsive technocratic or expert governments as the explanation for rise of populists in the United States and Europe (Luce 2018; Berman 2017).
Among our cases, a crisis of representation was ably exploited by Chávez’s outsider candidacy in Venezuela, as voters rejected the traditional political parties that they blamed for economic crisis, mismanagement, and corruption in the 1990s; i.e., too little polarization. Similar mobilization of marginalized or alienated sectors occurred with Thaksin in Thailand in his support from the relatively poor rural and northern parts of the country; the AKP in Turkey, as they mobilized Islamists together with other social, cultural, and geographical groups that felt hindered or disempowered by bureaucratic and economic elites; the civil society movement organized around constitutional reform and more pluralist representation in government and becoming the MDC opposition party in Zimbabwe; Estrada’s appeal to the marginalized poor in the Philippines; and of course the challenge to apartheid South Africa.
Economic grievance
Short-term economic crisis makes an easy target for political challengers. The populist Syriza party rose to dominance after three decades of alternation between two traditional political parties in Greece led to their implosion in the wake of the 2009 economic crisis, as did Chávez’s movement in Venezuela after the hyperinflation of the 1990s. Similarly, economic crisis and missteps by his opponent helped to propel Orbán’s Fidesz into office in Hungary in 2010 and motivated businessman Thaksin to run for office in Thailand following the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Turkey’s 2001 financial crisis helped the AKP initially to come to power with the electorate disillusioned with the existing parties.
Longer-term income inequality and relative deprivation can also serve as a mobilizing tool by targeting the economic anxiety of the “left-behinds.” The PiS party in Poland mobilized Catholics with their ideology of “solidarism” vs. liberalism, highlighting the relative deprivation felt by Poles who perceived a decline in their economic well-being and social esteem relative to the liberal elites benefitting from the post-Communist transformation. In Turkey, developmental policies based on import-substitution until the 1980s favored urban industrial interests at the expense of rural interests, forming a grievance held by the countryside that was represented successfully first by center-right parties and then by the AKP who bundled it together with other cleavages. Donald Trump argued that immigrants and foreign trade were “stealing jobs” from U.S. workers feeling left behind after decades of growing income inequality, using a polarizing globalist vs. nationalist message that pitted America against the world.
Cultural grievance
Cultural grievances around the rights of specific religions, or Church vs. State arguments, kulturkampfs between secularized and conservative lifestyles among members of the same religion, as well as moral debates around gender and sexual rights or issues of sex and death can become the most polarizing because moral issues are the most difficult on which to compromise (Skitka and Morgan 2014). The “cultural backlash” theory has also been argued to better predict populist votes in the United States and Great Britain than the economic anxiety theory (Inglehart and Norris 2016), while racial resentment was at least as important as economic anxiety in the Trump vote (Abramowitz and McCoy, this volume).
Cultural grievances also emerge from a perceived loss or threat of loss of social or economic status by a dominant group in society, as explained by dominant status group theory (King and Wheelock 2007; Outten et al 2012; Sidanius and Pratto 2001). In these cases, changing demographics and political realignments can produce anxiety among such groups and, commonly, a receptivity to polarizing populist messages. The reaction of white, male, Christian, Trump supporters to the presidency of a biracial man in the United States, and to the growing diversity of the United States (in terms of race, religion, sexual orientation, and gender relations in the workplace) exemplifies a perceived loss of social and economic status (Mutz 2018). Similarly, Fidesz party leader, Viktor Orbán, successfully articulated a desire to keep Hungary for ethnic Hungarians, capitalizing on the threat posed by the refugee crisis of Syrians and northern Africans entering Europe as a campaign theme. In Thailand, the backlash against Thaksin’s coalition of rural and Northern voters from the urban middle class and Southern voters was based, at least in part, on a perceived loss of social status as the urbanites lost electoral dominance to the rural majorities. Similarly, kulturkampf(s) between the less and more educated, between the more religious-conservative and rural and the more secular and urban, and even between proreligious and prosecular women activists underlie the polarization between the supporters and opponents of the AKP and Erdoğan.
Institutional antecedents and democratic historical experience
As our cases show, pernicious polarization can emerge in newer as well as established democracies. All of our cases had either a medium-term (20–40 years) experience with democracy, or a long-term history (more than 40 years). Thus, we argue that the length and quality of democratic history are more likely to impact the consequences of polarization for democracy, than to explain its emergence.
Likewise, we maintain that severe polarization can occur in democracies with various institutional setups, but the design and strength of institutions may impact the severity of polarization and its consequences for democracy. Hence, our cases include parliamentary as well as presidential democracies and those with proportional as well as majoritarian electoral systems. Our cases imply that institutional strength should be understood to entail, in addition to features such as credibility and adaptability (North 1990; Mahoney and Thelen 2010), the agentic dimension of how judiciously and consistently people manage the state institutions and implement formal and informal institutional rules at critical junctures. We return to these points in subsequent sections.
Institutional design can be expected to provide incentives and opportunities for polarizing political leaders and parties to pursue different strategies and seek to build different coalitions. Since proportional representation (PR) systems provide more opportunities for multiple, smaller parties to enter legislatures even when they represent similar cleavages and compete for overlapping constituencies, polarizing entrepreneurs may at least initially focus on the inward-looking strategy of consolidating their own bloc. In turn, since majoritarian electoral systems discourage smaller parties and the internal fragmentation of major electoral blocs, polarizing actors may concentrate on the outward-looking strategy of attacking and chipping away at the electoral support of the rival blocs.
As we discuss further in the section ahead on the dynamics and consequences of polarization, in general, single-member districts or mixed electoral systems (with some single-member and some proportional representation districts) are more likely to give disproportionate representation to the largest vote-getting party than are purely PR systems. We expect majoritarian electoral systems to deepen the democracy-eroding effects of polarization, and majoritarian and proportional systems to generate different incentives and opportunities for polarizing political agents.
In some of our cases, the polarizing period began with one party winning an absolute legislative majority, giving it the opportunity to then remake the rules to further its own advantage. This was the case in Bangladesh, Hungary, Poland, the Philippines, South Africa, Turkey, and the United States. Of these, the AL in Bangladesh, Fidesz in Hungary, the ANC in South Africa, and the AKP in Turkey all went on to reform the constitution, further enhancing the electoral advantage for the majority party and augmenting executive power. Erdoğan’s constitutional reform even changed the parliamentary system to an (executive) presidential one; he then went on to win the 2018 elections with significant new powers.
In other cases, the governing party at the beginning of the polarization period ruled in coalition, but subsequently gained absolute majorities and attempted constitutional reforms and major legislative changes. Thaksin first won power in Thailand in 2001 benefitting from a 1997 constitutional reform that aimed to strengthen political parties and the prime minister. His attempt to further change the constitution failed in 2001, but his party won subsequent elections with absolute majorities, only to be repeatedly deposed by a royalist-elitist-military coalition until the military took power indefinitely in 2014. Hugo Chávez won the presidency in Venezuela in 1998 without a legislative majority, but engineered a constitutional reform the following year, strengthening presidential powers and changing electoral rules, and another in 2009 abolishing term limits; his party won electoral majorities in every election until 2015.
Polarizing leaders also attempted, but failed, to change the constitution early in their mandates in Poland (PiS party in 2015) and the Philippines (Estrada in 1999). The PiS went on to implement the changes anyway with their legislative majority after changing the composition of the Constitutional Tribunal to a more compliant one. Zimbabwe’s polarizing periods each started out with ZANU-PF in power, but ended with power-sharing agreements as the challengers gained electoral strength and ZANU-PF was reluctant to give up power. The second polarization period (2000–2008) in fact started as a consequence of constitutional reform efforts, when the civil society movement defeating the government’s reform proposals formed a new political party in 2000 and won a legislative majority. They lost some ground in subsequent elections in the wake of severe repression but split the legislature in 2008 elections and formed a power-sharing government to end the electoral stand-off, a result that defused the polarization but left the ZANU-PF as the dominant power.
Only the United States and Greece did not see a constitutional reform effort. In the United States, scholars debate the role of institutional design in producing polarization (Sides and Hopkins 2015). Nevertheless, the partisan-led model of redistricting in most states creates a system of gerrymandering that gives the advantage to the party in power—in this case, to the Republican Party as they won power in a majority of states in the 2000s. And the democratization of party primary systems (adopted by both parties in the 1970s) contributed to the incentives for more extreme candidates to be selected by the activist partisans who tend to vote in primaries. Thus, polarization contributed to even greater polarization. New, stricter voter identification laws championed by the Republican Party, changes to campaign finance rules, and allegations of voter suppression also appeared to indicate efforts to enhance partisan electoral advantages. Given the difficulty of changing the constitution, the increasingly partisan battles over Supreme Court nominations revolve, in large part, around constitutional interpretation. In addition, important institutional rule changes result from and continue to shape the polarizing dynamic, such as removing the filibuster from judicial nominations.
Polarizing Dynamics: Common Patterns and Variations
One of the most notable characteristics of pernicious polarization is the Manichean, moralizing character of political discourse. Leaders and supporters alike describe their own and opposing political groups in black and white terms as good and evil. They ascribe nefarious, often immoral, intentions and demonstrate prejudice and bias against those in the opposing camp. In this sense, polarization politically activates the latent tendencies in the population toward ethnocentrism—generally favorable views toward the in-group, and unfavorable stereotyping of the out-group (Kinder and Kam 2009).
As we noted in the introductory article, many of our cases involve populist leaders, who often bundle populism with other polarizing themes and messages. Further, populist leaders generally employ polarizing language and often generate antipopulist counter-mobilizations. Therefore, we are examining populism as one of the discursive dimensions of polarization. Scholars of populism identify Manichean discourse as one of three elements of populism, the other two being pro-people and anti-elite (Hawkins et al. 2018; Mudde and Kaltwasser 2017). In the majority of our cases, polarizing politicians regularly divide the populace into the “good” people and the “evil” elites. Populist leaders rail against the establishment or the elites, blaming them for the plight of the people, while upholding the virtues of the undefined “people” whom they claim to represent.
When opponents reciprocate with derogatory antipopulist language, the polarizing dynamic spirals. For example, in Venezuela, supporters of Hugo Chávez were called chusmas (gangs) by their opponents, while Chávez’s supporters referred to the middle- and upper-class opposition as sifrinos (a slang term from a song about a rich, brainless woman caring only about luxury consumption) (McCoy and Diez 2011). Kongkirati in this volume describes the Manichean language on both sides in Thailand: “It is an uncompromising warfare between the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’; ‘moral, clean, enlightened’ and ‘immoral, corrupt, stupid’ people; ‘patriots’ and ‘traitors’; and ‘aristocrat’ and ‘commoners.’” In the United States, Donald Trump gives derogatory nicknames to political opponents and critics, while categorizing entire sectors with pejoratives, such as “fake media.” Trump opponents often imply his supporters are racist or ignorant.
But we see the same Manichean discourse denigrating opponents while lauding supporters even in cases that are not as saliently populist in their politics, implying that it reflects a general feature of polarizing politics, whereby the “elites vs. people” frame salient in populism constitutes a subtype of it. For example, Rahman describes the language used by both parties in Bangladesh in the polarizing episode of the International Crimes Tribunal: “Chaagu, a very derogatory Bengali term meaning a person with the intellectual level of a sheep, became popular with the pro-Shahbag elements to describe the anti-Tribunal elements.” Meanwhile the opposition BNP leader “publicly identified the pro-Tribunal Shahbag movement as the congregation of ‘immoral atheists.’” In Zimbabwe, LeBas and Munemo report that in the earlier conflict between ZANU and ZAPU, ZANU showed a “clear pattern of targeting Ndebele civilians on the presumption that all Ndebele were ZAPU supporters and were also dissidents: ‘the child of a snake is also a snake.’” In the second polarizing period between ZANU-PF and the MDC, the symbolic delegitimation of the coopted opposition leader continued even after the power-sharing agreement appointing the MDC leader prime minister was signed: “Zimbabwe’s military chiefs refused to salute Tsvangirai at his inauguration, citing his lack of liberation war credentials, and high-ranking military officials referred to him as a security threat or as ‘taking orders from foreigners’ throughout the power-sharing period.”
Social psychologists have found that social identity leads group members to hold positive sentiments toward in-group members and negative sentiments toward out-group members. The more salient the identity, the stronger the loyalty toward in-group members and the prejudice and antipathy toward out-group members tend to be (Tajfel and Turner 1979; Gaertner et al 1993). The dynamics of intergroup conflict in particular lead members of a group to exhibit sympathy and loyalty to members of their group, while they exhibit antipathy and prejudice toward members of the out-group.
We argued in McCoy, Rahman, and Somer (2018) that “severely polarized democracies exhibit the tribal nature of intergroup dynamics, in which members become fiercely loyal to their ‘team,’ wanting it to win at all costs, and strongly biased or prejudiced against the other group. The psychology of polarization becomes fundamental as mechanisms of dehumanization, depersonalization, and stereotyping all contribute to the emotional loathing, fear, and distrust of the out-partisans” (p. 23). Politicians use symbols and language to create an “us” and “them” identity and thus contribute to these psychological mechanisms, whether intentionally or unintentionally.
In polarized politics, negative campaigning reinforces the antipathy toward the out-party’s candidates and supporters. As a consequence, we often see a rise in negative partisanship, as Abramowitz and McCoy show in their case study of the United States in this volume—when vote choices are informed by a voter’s dislike of an opposing candidate more than their liking of their own candidate. The use of insults to characterize opponents contributes to the psychological categorization of individuals, and the very usage of pronouns, where entire categories of persons are referred to not by name, but as the impersonal “them,” depersonalizes and makes it easy to dehumanize them. Language of blame is commonly used, where blame is placed on “them,” the out-group, who are victimizing “us,” the in-group.
In polarizing settings, people who hold moderate opinions and maintain interests and identities that cut across the dividing line are increasingly ostracized, diminishing any chance of dialogue between opposing groups. As the Venezuelan case shows, it becomes nearly impossible to claim a neutral or middle position in a polarized polity as the most vocal proponents of each camp (usually the most radical positions) attempt to label or categorize not only individuals, but also media, and educational and civic organizations as belonging to one side or the other. Those who attempt to have a dialogue or compromise with the other side are then labeled as traitors or sell-outs (McCoy and Diez 2011; Garcia-Gaudilla and Mallen, this volume). Likewise, Somer in this volume argues how trimodal polarization in Turkey turned incrementally bi-modal as potential “bridge-makers” in the middle were wiped out and it became increasingly difficult for people to remain nonpartisan and maintain a critical position toward both blocs at the same time.
In fact, in pernicious polarization, intra-bloc tensions often escalate as high as do the inter-bloc tensions, whereby the hardliners and softliners within each bloc may fiercely blame each other. In the Turkish case, an example of this is the ongoing dispute between those opposition actors who had opposed a critical set of constitutional reforms, which the AKP government passed in a crucial 2010 referendum, by arguing these changes would crack the door open for AKP hegemony and authoritarianism; and those who had defended the reforms by arguing that they were not enough, but they were worth supporting, using the campaign slogan “insufficient but yes,” as Somer discusses in his contribution. In Venezuela, it includes the divide within the opposition to President Maduro about whether to spur a presidential resignation or ouster through street protests, or focus resources on the tedious work of grass-roots organization-building to compete electorally. More recently, intra-opposition divides included the debate over whether to participate at all in unfair elections. Such divides can fragment an opposition and help to consolidate the rule of the dominant party.
Structural changes also tend to happen in the economy, bureaucracy, and key sectors, such as the media, that enable or reinforce the weakening of the middle ground in public and political discourse. Accordingly, ownership and/or management of institutions shift to opportunistic or ideological loyalists of one bloc or the other. This results in a situation where, for example, independent journalists find it increasingly more difficult to shape the news, or, worse, maintain their jobs.
Thus, a summary of the most striking features of pernicious polarization in our cases that distinguish it from a healthy pluralism in democratic society:
a) Division of the electorate into two hostile camps, where multiple cleavages have collapsed into one dominant cleavage or boundary line between the two camps.
b) The political identity of the two camps becomes a social identity in which members feel they belong to a “team” and demonstrate strong loyalty to it.
c) Political demands and interests become formed around those identities.
d) The two camps are characterized in moral terms of “good” and “evil.”
e) The identities and interests of the two camps are viewed as mutually exclusive and antagonistic, thus negating the possibility of common interests between different groups.
f) A greater cohesion grows within groups, and greater conflict and hostility between groups.
g) Stereotyping and prejudice builds toward the out-group due to lack of direct communication and/or social interaction.
h) The center drops out and the polarized camps attempt to label all individuals and groups in society as one or the other.
i) Institutions, including media, become dominated by one bloc or the other through discursive changes as well as changes of ownership, management, and staff, weakening the middle ground in public and political discourses.
j) The antagonistic relationship manifests in spatial and psychological separation of the polarized groups.
Life of its own
Once the forces of polarization are set in motion, they often take on a life of their own. Social and political incentives make it increasingly more convenient for individuals to go along with polarization, and, if and when a critical mass is reached, powerful cascade (bandwagon) effects can be activated (Kuran 1995; Somer 2001). Though the polarizing dynamics may be initiated and sustained by political entrepreneurs for their own political benefits, it can become self-propagating and entrap those very political actors. Somer describes in this volume the process in Turkey: when Erdoğan’s AKP used polarizing tactics to mobilize voters and win, it “triggered changes that transformed the AKP itself and the mainstream political field at large. … [T]his logic of polarization locked both the party and its rivals in a web of intended, unintended, and mutually reinforcing policies and discourses, which were antidemocratic or had democracy-destroying consequences.”
As polarization extends into other areas of social interaction and sharpens Us vs. Them identity politics, interactions along all other planes diminish considerably, channels of communication between groups break down, and intragroup solidarity increases at the expense of intergroup cohesion. Palonen (2009) describes the “totalizing” nature of polarization as it extends from the political to societal realms—a process perhaps most advanced in our set of cases of Venezuela and Hungary, but increasingly in the United States and Turkey as well.
The dominant political frontier creates a point of identification and confrontation in the political system, where consensus is found only within the political camps themselves. Polarization is reproduced in all political and social contests with an intensity that distinguishes it from mere two-party politics. It is a totalizing system, as it aims to dominate the existing system of differences and identities. (Palonen 2009, 321)
Variations
We have already discussed variations in the types of underlying cleavages and grievances. There are also variations in the political motivations or strategic aims underlying the use of polarizing strategies, and the actual strategies used by polarizing incumbents and oppositions, to which we now turn.
Strategic and ideological aims of polarizing elites
The strategic and ideological aims underlying elites’ use of polarization as a political strategy also vary. We identify three basic patterns giving rise to the political use of polarization: the more stationary and pro-status-quo pattern of intra-elite power struggles and party competition, and the inclusionary and exclusionary versions of transformative politics in which mass-based popular demands for fundamental change are channeled and exploited by a political entrepreneur able to capitalize on this demand.
In the first pattern, intra-elite conflicts drive rival elites to compete for political power by mobilizing voters to boost their electoral chances. They may do so on the basis of appeals to populism or other claims to represent a sector of the population or the people. These are not so much democratizing efforts to include new sectors into the polity and economy, as they are elite instrumentalism to further their own interests. These efforts may turn into a polarized struggle between elites able to capitalize on the vertical accountability of popular sovereignty and elections in competition with other elites who dominate the horizontal accountability of institutional checks and balances to constrain the executive (Slater and Arugay 2018).
Intra-elite competitions characterized polarization in Bangladesh and Zimbabwe following national liberation wars from colonialism, in which rival elites claimed the mantle of representing revolutionary legitimacy (Rahman; LeBas and Munemo, this volume) and “manufactured” differences to be able to compete electorally, and in Thailand and the Philippines as disaffected elites created their own political movements to further their own agendas (Kongkirati; Arugay and Slater, this volume).
In the second and third patterns, polarization becomes a transformative political strategy, in which the dominant political motive and discursive focus seem to be either progressive-inclusionary, seeking to include previously marginalized sectors, or reactionary-exclusionary, seeking to exclude threatening outsiders. In these patterns, polarizing politicians challenge the status quo, often with populist undertones. While demand from the electorate is not absent in the first pattern of intra-elite power struggles, in the cases of transformative polarization, the masses play a more proactive role in demanding and mobilizing for change, which is then channeled by a political entrepreneur, often a political outsider who seizes the political opportunity.
In the progressive-inclusionary version, polarizing confrontation is required to achieve democratizing reforms, argue the challengers. Turkey under Erdoğan, which Somer in this volume analyzes as a case of “polarizing-cum-transformative politics,” and Venezuela under Chávez, arguably the cases with the most revolutionary political aims, are the exemplars of pernicious polarization becoming self-propagating and producing authoritarian outcomes under the new elites. In both cases, polarizing actors successfully mobilized and then acted upon the new status- and redistribution-seeking, upwardly mobile and progressive impulses of previously marginalized groups.
In the reactionary-exclusionary version of transformative polarization, the restoration of declining dominant group status requires excluding interlopers, assert the challengers. Hence, polarizing actors act upon the reactionary and exclusive impulses of masses who feel they have suffered loss of status and resources. Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Poland’s Jaroslaw Kaczyński, and Donald Trump in the United States all use system-delegitimizing rhetoric and populist appeals to capitalize on existing fears and anxieties and create new ones, particularly focusing on anti-immigrant and racial appeals. Their parties practice asymmetric polarization at the elite level, as Tworzecki describes, with the victorious challengers breaking with the prevailing liberal-democratic consensus and moving their parties toward ever more extremes.
Incumbent strategies
Once in power, polarizing elites choose a strategy to govern and to conduct relations with the opposition, conditioned on their own capacity. Most polarizing incumbents work to entrench their electoral advantages. In fact, a prevalent trend during polarization in our cases, described above, is the temptation to amass sufficient power to change the rules, once in power, to further advantage the majority party and strengthen executive power. Electoral rules that produce disproportionate representation provide incentives for new and old elites to mobilize voters in either the Machiavellian intra-elite power struggles illustrated by the Philippines, or the counter-establishment struggles illustrated by Venezuela.
Similarly, incumbent polarizing parties typically attempt to govern on their own and eschew norms for bipartisan or multi-partisan decision-making. As Figure 1 shows, all of our cases experienced a decline in willingness to compromise during the polarization periods (indicated by willingness to consult with other actors, or respect for counter-arguments), except for Greece and the Philippines. Bangladesh started at a low rate of compromise within the bipolar party system after independence, and continued at a low rate as polarization intensified after 2010.
Country Scores on Freedom, Press Freedom, Parties Willingness to Consult, and Respect for Counterarguments, 2000–2016
Incumbents must decide how to achieve and then maintain a winning majority to be able to govern, including whether to continue polarizing or to depolarize. Here we analyze the common options for a polarizing strategy identified in our cases of severe polarization, and in the last section we return to theoretical options to depolarize. The strategies to maintain power that are most pernicious for democracy, then, are to govern unilaterally without consulting the opposition, to ally with smaller parties to form a majority, to coopt the opposition, or to repress dissent, discussed here:
a. Govern with own majority and without consultation with the opposition, contingent on electoral rules and popular mobilization capacity. Hungary (Fidesz), Turkey (AKP), the Philippines (Estrada), and the United States (Trump). In South Africa, the ANC has been the dominant majority party since 1994, but re-polarization is only incipient.
b. Ally with smaller, extreme parties, when unable to gain a majority on their own. This was the case at least initially for polarizing parties in Thailand, Bangladesh, Poland, and Venezuela. In Greece, Syriza allied with an extreme populist party on the opposite side of the ideological extreme.
c. Defang the opposition by cooptation, co-habitation, or power-sharing settlement. Zimbabwe’s two episodes illustrate ZANU-PF’s strategy of defanging the opposition with power-sharing agreements in which specific positions are guaranteed for the opposition, but ZANU-PF retains the dominant role. As LeBas and Munemo show, such power-sharing settlements do not guarantee de-polarization, particularly once the polarization extends into society, and do not necessarily represent a democratizing move.
To remain in power, incumbent parties may adjust to new circumstances and develop cocktail strategies. Turkey’s AKP and Erdoğan, for example, have been combining their main majoritarian strategy with cooptation by regularly recruiting popular and critical politicians from smaller opposition parties into their own ranks, and, since 2016, by building alliances with several erstwhile critical extreme-nationalist parties, some of which are becoming satellite parties.
d. Govern through repression. Common practices include legal maneuvers to exclude rival candidacies and tilt the electoral playing field, stack the courts, or outright repression of dissent and speech—jailing dissidents, curtailing civic freedoms, and cracking down on popular protests. Both Turkey and Venezuela, in particular, exemplify this strategy in recent years.
Opposition strategies
As we have argued, polarization is both political and relational (Somer and McCoy, this volume; McCoy, Rahman, Somer 2018). Thus the reaction of opposition parties and social groups is critical to the dynamics of polarization. Our case studies demonstrate that the relational component can change over time within a polarizing episode and within a single country. A rough balance of power between two poles may entail similar capacities to mobilize people at the polls or in the streets, resulting in alternating elections or clashing street protests. But a balance of power may also entail an advantage in numbers in the polls or the streets, on one side, and an advantage in institutional control on the other. A good example is Thailand, where the populist Thai Rak Thai party (and its successors) had a consistent advantage in numbers in the polls, and an ability to mobilize street protests, while the opposing royalist-elite factions had an institutional advantage, particularly in the military and the courts, while also mobilizing street protests. Eventually, with the opposing coalition unable to overcome the populist electoral advantage, the military staged its culminating coup in 2014.
Venezuela’s two decades of Bolivarian Revolution demonstrates how the balance of power can shift under polarization. Chávez moved to balance his initial institutional weakness and legislative minority by proposing a constituent assembly and new constitution, both with electoral rules favorable to his party and enhanced presidential powers. The resulting power balance gave him a legislative majority and partial control of major public institutions, while his opposition mounted massive street protests and a military coup temporarily removed him from office. After Chávez survived a recall referendum in 2004, a demoralized opposition ceded legislative control in an ill-conceived electoral boycott, while Chávez’s party moved to gain control over the Supreme Court, Electoral Council, media, and civil society organizations. For a decade, Chávez’s party dominated political decision-making in a unipolar asymmetry, while the society continued to be polarized, until the political opposition regrouped to win a super-majority in the 2015 legislative elections. Growing opposition threatening electoral chances of Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro, led the Maduro government to rely increasingly on repression of popular protests and dissent, electoral manipulation, and growing authoritarianism to remain in power.
Opposition political strategies thus include the basic decisions whether to reciprocate polarizing tactics or try to depolarize politics based on inclusive and unifying platforms, whether to compromise and share power with the incumbent or unite against the incumbent, and whether to use electoral and institutional accountability mechanisms (judicial rulings or impeachment proceedings) or extra-constitutional or nondemocratic efforts to constrain or remove the incumbent, as described below:
a. Counter-mobilize and reciprocally polarize. Political oppositions may unite to counter the polarizing incumbents’ power either electorally, i.e. by mobilizing voters through new strategies, programs and discourses, in the streets through protests, or in the institutions. If they adopt reciprocal strategies using polarizing and Manichean discourse they often reinforce the pernicious logic of polarization in a downward spiral that may threaten the democratic system even further. Turkey’s Gezi protests in 2013, for example, exemplified massive grassroots mobilization vilifying the government’s polarizing and authoritarian policies and bringing together diverse societal groups demanding democratization; but they ended up antagonizing progovernment groups and accelerating polarization, government oppression, and democratic breakdown. Stavrakakis (2018) highlights, for example, the dehumanizing antipopulist rhetoric not only within Greek politics and media, but also at the European Union level, where political leaders and journalists referred to the populist challenge to austerity as abnormal, using medical terms (Greece as a “corrupt, ailing body”), subhuman terms (“Neanderthal, cave man”), or monster terms (“monster of populism, executioner of democracy, beast of populism”) (pp. 53–54). Stavarakakis fears that elite refusal to recognize the democratizing aspect of populist challengers will further the spiral of pernicious polarization.
An example of reciprocal norm violation is the tit-for-tat behavior of the Republican and Democratic parties in the United States that led to a steady erosion of bipartisanship in judicial appointments during the Obama and early Trump administrations. The Republican Senate majority finally pulled the plug on bipartisan confirmations of Supreme Court justices, with the so-called nuclear option when they abandoned the filibuster rule and thus any pretense at bipartisan appointments (Abramowitz and McCoy, this volume). Counter-mobilization strategies by opposition coalitions created a rough balance between two poles (with electoral and/or institutional power) at least at times under the polarizing episodes in Bangladesh, Greece, the Philippines, Thailand, the United States, Venezuela, Turkey, and Zimbabwe.
b. Overcome opposition fragmentation. Opposition groups may fail to unite to effectively confront a polarizing incumbent party, either because of interparty rivalries or because traditional parties have been rejected by voters in favor of new challengers. Yet opposition failures to overcome fragmentation that we observe in our cases may also reflect a built-in dynamic of polarization: opposition groups may find it a challenging task to unite without employing the strategy of “counter-mobilize and polarize” and face the resulting pitfalls we discussed above.
With fragmented or disorganized opposition, the incumbent party can more easily change the rules and dominate institutions, making it even harder for opponents to organize to challenge the now hegemonic party. The experiences of Venezuela, Hungary, Turkey, Poland, and Thailand at some point during their polarization episode exemplify this pattern, fostering polarization with the new elites gaining dominance. In the Philippines, after the forced removal of Estrada in 2001, both sides in the bipolar struggle fragmented and realigned, with Estrada forces and Aquino forces aligned against Arroyo. This intra-elite struggle re-equilibrated with the return of oligarchic democracy under Benigno Aquino in 2010, only to be threatened again with the ascent of the illiberal populist Rodrigo Duterte.
c. Compromise and share power. A variation on the pattern of opposition fragmentation is Zimbabwe’s cohabitation, or power-sharing settlements, in which the opposition party lost its mobilization capacity once joining in the power structure as a junior partner. Such loss of mobilizational capacity may not occur whenever the party in question has an ethnic or regional basis. This was the case with Turkey’s pro-Kurdish party that partially cooperated with the AKP government for the sake of a peace settlement in 2014–15. In this situation, however, the ethnic-regional cleavage may reinforce opposition fragmentation and weakness, as indeed happened in Turkey.
d. Unconstitutional or nondemocratic means to constrain or remove a polarizing incumbent. In the extreme, oppositions use nondemocratic means to try to remove a polarizing incumbent. Examples include the attempted coups in Venezuela and Turkey, manipulated impeachment processes in the Philippines, and threatened military interventions in Turkey in the AKP’s early periods and repeated judicial and military interventions in Thailand. The risk here is that such maneuvers threaten to generate a backlash among supporters of the beleaguered incumbent and those who oppose antidemocratic actions, increasing and even broadening his/her support.
e. Legal institutional means to constrain executive abuse of power. Our cases also illustrate many instances of judicial interventions against polarizing and authoritarian incumbents where one would be unjustified or hard pressed to argue that these interventions were formally unconstitutional. Examples are the ongoing legal investigations and threatened impeachment cases against U.S. President Trump (Abramowitz and McCoy, this volume), the Constitutional Court case to shut down the AKP in Turkey in 2008 (Somer, this volume), and the National Assembly’s votes to investigate and censure Venezuelan President Maduro (García-Guadilla and Mallen, this volume).
f. Oppose polarization and work for de-polarization. Since we analyze in this project only democracies that have been suffering varying degrees of severe polarization, our sample is biased against cases where de-polarization strategies were successful. However, our case analyses provide important insights regarding the difficulties of this strategy, and examples of attempted and partially or locally successful de-polarization to which we return in the last section.
Consequences for Democracy
We mentioned in our introduction to this article that polarization can sometimes serve useful democratic ends and should not be regarded as a necessarily bad feature of governance. In this volume, Greece in the 1980s and 1990s, Bangladesh in the early post-independence years, and even Zimbabwe in the 2000s reflect a constructive role of polarization in contributing to early institutionalization of party systems. Two kinds of danger may arise, however, while this is happening. The first emerges when the consolidation of the polarized blocs occurs asymmetrically, that is one side becomes politically strong, while the other may remain fragmented. The reasons may be agentic, organizational, or structural, for example, related to the country’s ethnic and ideological makeup. Whatever the underlying reasons, such asymmetry increases the possibility of democratic erosion under the hegemony of new elites, as happened in Turkey, or under the return of old elites who feel existentially threatened, as occurred in Thailand.
The second danger for democracy is when the polarizing parties engage in aggressive discourse and behavior that delegitimize their opponents and the political system. They then unleash the dynamics described above and across our cases, often leading voters to perceive greater polarization than the policy differences among parties warrant, to discount substantive information, and to develop more confidence in “less substantively grounded opinions” (Druckman, Peterson, and Slothuus 2013). These two perils for democracy can sometimes reinforce each other. Asymmetry, for example, can induce actors to up the ante vis-a-vis their polarizing and antagonizing rhetoric, either because of insecurity or hegemonic ambitions.
Often, a very slippery slope connects the simplification of politics as a struggle between two major rival blocs, which is a constitutive feature of most polarizing politics, to the vilification of these rivals and the effective emasculation of any ties cutting across the dividing line, features of pernicious polarization. Many dynamics that turn polarization pernicious are built-in and hard to control for the very political actors that initiate it. For example, as soon as a political party begins to over-simplify political disagreements and vilify its rivals, this also begins to transform the party itself by advantaging less principled actors, at the expense of more principled actors within the party (Somer, this volume). Likewise, it is not always clear how opposition actors can respond to polarizing incumbents “constructively.” When they abstain from counter-polarization, for instance by not vilifying an incumbent, they may be seen as accepting and thus legitimizing the incumbent’s unscrupulous tactics and violation of accepted democratic norms. When they counter-mobilize with their own polarizing tactics and malign their opponents, on the other hand, they may contribute to pernicious polarization and end up accelerating democratic erosion (Somer, this volume).
What is more, the practice of demonizing opponents feeds the unfavorable views of opposing parties and their supporters, and the emotional reactions of affective polarization that distances party supporters from each other. This social distancing based on partisanship is evidenced heartbreakingly in the polling in Turkey and United States, which shows unwillingness to live near, marry into, or have their children play with families supporting opposing parties (Somer, this volume; Abramowitz and McCoy, this volume; McCoy, Rahman, and Somer 2018). The Economist’s Democracy Index even downgraded U.S. democracy in 2016 for its growing social polarization and its negative impact on the functioning of democracy (Economist 2017).
Rhetoric is crucial because political elites give cues to their voters that influence political attitudes (Zaller 1992, 1994). System-delegitimizing rhetoric, such as the Polish PiS party’s refrain that the country is “in ruins” due to elite profligate spending (Tworzecki, this volume), or Donald Trump’s dark inaugural speech blaming past administrations for the “American carnage,” contribute to perceptions of a democracy deficit. Large sectors of the electorate may then demand systemic change, despite evidence of positive economic growth and, in the case of Poland, even strong happiness scores (Tworzecki, this volume; Abramowitz and McCoy, this volume). Distrust in representative institutions—especially legislatures and political parties—further undermines the legitimacy of the political system.
Several of our cases demonstrate how attacks on the media by incumbents contribute to declining faith in the media and information as well as growing tolerance of restrictions on free speech for critics and journalists by the incumbents’ supporters. Even with formal censorship absent, individual journalists and media institutions, like the rest of the citizenry, may feel the pressure of the “either-or” logic of polarizing politics. They may feel compelled to pick one side or the other so that they can preserve their jobs or readership, nonpartisan journalism thus becomes increasingly difficult. As Figure 1 shows, all our cases experienced a deterioration in Freedom House’s measure of press freedom during the periods of intense polarization. Political polarization was associated with a polarized media in all our cases except South Africa, and in the cases moving toward authoritarianism, an intentional aim to gain government control over private media, either through outright closures or purchases, or through tax or judicial harassment (Hungary, Turkey, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe).
Finally, growing affective polarization and negative partisanship contributes to a growing perception among citizens that the opposing party and their policies pose a threat to the nation or an individual’s way of life. Most dangerously for democracy, these perceptions of threat open the door to undemocratic behavior by an incumbent and his/her supporters to stay in power, or by opponents to remove the incumbent from power (McCoy, Rahman, and Somer 2018; Svolik 2018).
The cumulative effect of severe polarization as we have defined it here is a deterioration in the quality of democracy, leading to backsliding, illiberalism, and in some cases reversion to autocracy. Figure 1 shows the declines in freedom as measured by Freedom House, while Figure 2 shows the declines in liberal democracy measured in the Varieties of Democracy database during and in some cases after the periods of polarization identified in our cases.
Liberal Democracy Country Scores and Polarization Episodes
Predicting the outcomes for democracies
One of our key motivating questions is to understand how and when the expected benign polarization of normal politics becomes transformed into pernicious polarization with harmful consequences for democracy. And further, to identify the factors that might predict different outcomes for democracy. The answers may spell the difference between democratic reform and deepening democratic instability, and democratic collapse.
We have already discussed the important role of elite behavior and discourse, and demonstrated the ubiquitous occurrence of demonizing and denigrating discourse about opponents and critics in polarized contexts. We return to strategic behavior below, but first we consider institutional conditions at the meso and macro levels of political party systems, electoral systems, and systems of government. We then present a preliminary theory of polarization with pernicious consequences, focusing on the nature of the dividing line and how the balance of power dynamics in the relationship between the political poles inform their strategies and constrain the outcome for democracy.
Institutional factors: Constraints on executive power and destabilizing aspects of polarization, or incentives for polarization and de-democratization?
Institutions alone neither explain when pernicious polarization occurs, nor can they definitively resolve it. But some institutional factors emerge from our analysis as important facilitating conditions; namely, the nature of the electoral system, powers delegated to the head of government, and strength and use of accountability mechanisms.
Electoral system
We find that the most extreme cases of polarization among our countries emerge in contexts of majoritarian electoral systems that produce a disproportionate representation for the majority or plurality party, and that, once in power, the polarizing parties and incumbents attempt, and often succeed, in engineering additional constitutional and legal changes to enhance their electoral advantage. In one case that disproportionate system backfired when the Venezuelan opposition finally won a two-thirds majority in government with a popular vote of only 56 percent after 15 years of the Bolivarian Revolution.
Proportional representation electoral systems do not guarantee escape from pernicious polarization, though, if they employ majoritarian-enhancing mechanisms. For example, Turkey has a proportional representation system but also a high threshold for parties to win seats (10 percent of the votes), along with a disproportionate distribution of seats favoring rural areas. The Greek electoral system, after 2012, awards a “bonus” of fifty seats to the largest party, which helped Syriza to gain a majority.
As McCoy, Rahman, and Somer (2018), and Vegetti (this volume) point out, the winner-take-all logic produced by institutional rules in disproportionate majoritarian electoral systems, combined with the psychological elements of the “us-versus-them” discourse employed in severely polarized party systems, provide perverse incentives for de-democratization. The zero-sum perceptions of such systems led governing parties to further work to cement their electoral advantages with revised electoral formulas, gerrymandered electoral redistricting, restrictive voter registration, and other such constitutional and legal reforms in Bangladesh, Hungary, Turkey, the United States, and Venezuela. The resulting electoral immobilism entrenched with institutional disproportionate rules contributes to the extension of political polarization to the societal level, and makes polarization even more difficult to overcome (Vegetti, this volume).
System of government
Whether a country is a parliamentary or presidential democracy alone does not seem to determine incentives for polarization. Instead, the determining factor appears to be direct election of the head of government, the powers attributed to the executive by constitutional authority, and a majoritarian electoral system giving disproportionate representation to the largest party. As indicated in Table 2, among our cases, five are presidential systems with direct elections, while six are parliamentary with relatively strong prime ministers (in Turkey and Thailand, the powers of chief executive were enhanced prior to polarization). Nevertheless, nine of the eleven have disproportionate representation: seven with majoritarian electoral systems (single member districts or mixed electoral systems) and two with proportional representation electoral systems with bonus to the largest party.
Institutional Factors
Turkey’s parliamentary system with a strong president changed to direct election of president in 2014 and then to an executive presidential system in 2017.
Party system institutionalization
The level of party system institutionalization does not appear to predict the rise of polarizing leaders (whether populist or national liberation), nor the outcome for democracy. Our cases include highly institutionalized party systems (United States, Bangladesh, Hungary, Turkey, Poland), moderately institutionalized systems (Zimbabwe, Venezuela), and weak systems (Philippines, Thailand) according to Varieties of Democracy (Coppedge 2018). The cases with the least pernicious polarization—South Africa, Greece—have strong systems.
Accountability institutions
Institutional constraints on executive abuse of power via mechanisms of accountability and checks and balances can be a double-edged sword under polarization. Among our cases, we see both democratic and undemocratic uses of accountability institutions by oppositions to constrain executive abuse of power, as well as the undemocratic use of such institutions by an autocratizing party/incumbent to maintain power and weaken its challengers. Thus the strength of these institutions, as well as the motivations of the coalitions that dominate them, are crucial to determine whether they play a democratizing or autocratizing role.
Slater and Arugay (2018) contrast the Machiavellian strategies of street protest and constitutional hardball used by political actors unable to compete electorally in intra-elite power struggles in Thailand and the Philippines with Madisonian strategies of relying on constitutional mechanisms to constrain executive overreach in Taiwan and Indonesia. In Turkey and Venezuela, antipopulist forces had sufficient presence in the military, courts, and bureaucracies to restrain populists in the early years. But they soon resorted to extraconstitutional measures to strive to contain the populists’ electoral advantages, rather than conducting the coalition-building, democratizing internal reform and voter mobilization necessary to compete at the ballot box (Somer; Garcia-Guillen and Mallen, this volume). In turn, Erdoğan and Chávez transformed those very institutions over time and populated them with loyalists. They then used the accountability institutions in an undemocratic way against opponents and internal dissenters in an increasingly repressive manner.
Toward a Theory of Pernicious Polarization’s Harm to Democracy
We have argued that agency plays a fundamental role in pernicious polarization in democracies, and that both supply and demand factors are important. On the demand side, popular grievances or elite disaffection leading to intra-elite power struggles underlie all our cases. Yet on the supply side (the political leaders), the most pernicious polarizations involve divisions that are brought to the forefront of the national agenda or even manufactured by elites. Grievances and latent cleavages exist, but they are most often activated, exploited, or distorted—in the sense that the normal complexity of politics is wiped out and cross-cutting and otherwise de-polarizing identities are rendered politically irrelevant—by political elites who choose the issue or grievance to highlight and create the divisive us-and-them perceptions.
We find that the relation between political actors and the political use of polarization as a strategy predict its effects. That is, just as crucial as the supply of polarizing figures is the reaction of opponents. If they adopt similar polarizing strategies rather than internal reforms and unequivocally prodemocracy electoral mobilization and civic engagement, they are likely to provoke outcomes of either “careening” or a hegemonic party with autocratizing tendencies.
Figure 3 presents two conditioning factors that we consider to be critical in predicting the severity of polarization and its potential consequences for democracy: polarization formed around formative rifts, and the relative balance of power in electoral mobilizing capacity of the two camps. These factors shape the political uses of polarization and the reactions of political actors to it, as well as the possibilities for a polity to handle its polarizing episode democratically.
Predicted Outcomes of Pernicious Polarization
We hypothesize that polarizations shaped around formative rifts are more enduring and pernicious. As discussed above, unresolved historical debates over what constitutes the core component of national identity or the basis of citizenship rights seem to underlie contemporary polarizations in Bangladesh, Zimbabwe, Turkey, South Africa, and the United States. We hypothesize that the cleavages formed around these unresolved national debates are particularly difficult for politics precisely because they involve state identity and belonging. As LeBas (2018, 61) suggests, “Pre-existing binary narratives of group belonging and citizenship make polarization more devastating when it occurs” by rendering inter-group disputes more difficult to resolve through bargaining.
While LeBas posits this type of polarization is more likely to generate violence and democratic breakdown, we argue that it is more likely to have the negative consequences for democracy described in this article because it questions who has the right to live in a polity as a full citizen—membership vs. non-membership—and whether one group can claim exclusive legitimacy to represent the citizens in government. Polarization thus becomes threatening and causes mutual polarizing reactions in a relational way, leading to democratic erosion. It becomes an enduring feature of democratic politics because the competing political identities extend into the society such that even if one camp is able to dominate over the other and temporarily defuse the polarization episode, the latent polarization residing in the society will facilitate its resurgence unless the political actors take constructive steps toward resolving the national debates.
We further hypothesize that the relative balance of power between the poles, and, in particular, the existence of cross-class parties capable of mobilizing popular electoral support, shapes the strategies of political actors and the dynamics of polarization. Where the party system has developed competing mass-based parties, political actors are more likely to engage in electoral competitions even when formative rifts around competing foundational myths about the heroes and villains of national independence and national identity lead to severe polarization, such as in Bangladesh. However, if some exogenous or self-imposed condition or crisis, or a long-lasting problem such as corruption, weakens attachment to traditional parties and opens the door to political outsiders, the relative balance of power shifts, as does the political calculation of political actors. When capacity for electoral mobilization is or becomes very unbalanced, access to institutional sources of power become important in shaping the dynamics of polarization. As Slater and Arugay (2018) argue, contemporary polarizations in South East Asia result from changes ushering in disequilibria between the two fundamental accountability mechanisms of democracy: vertical accountability of voting, and horizontal accountability of restraints on executive power.
In cases where the opposition either never had or lost the capacity to match the electoral mobilization capacity of the new populists, opponents are likely to turn to institutional sources of power in the courts, military, and bureaucracy. Where attempts to use institutional mechanisms to constrain or defeat a polarizing leader fail, the incumbents can consolidate their institutional power through constitutional changes and majoritarian politics. Indeed, in many of our cases such as the Philippines, Thailand, Turkey, and Venezuela, the opponents at some point became impatient and resorted to extraconstitutional measures to try to remove the incumbent, rather than democratize internally and rebuild their electoral mobilization capacity. In other cases, like Hungary and Zimbabwe after the second polarizing period in the 2000–08, the oppositions weakened and divided, unable to constrain the hegemonic party.
Thus, as indicated in the top, right of Figure 3, a rough balance of electoral mobilization capacity and politics polarizing around formative rifts is expected to lead to sustained polarizing politics and likely alternation of power with diminishing quality of democracy, until one side gains the upper hand through court appointments and electoral law changes to enhance their electoral advantage, as happened in Turkey and Bangladesh. Even if polarization is temporarily defused with one party consolidating its power, it is likely to reemerge as the society remains polarized with the failure to address the underlying issues of the formative rifts.
The exception to this outcome arises in one of two conditions: i) when opposing elites refrain from delegitimizing polarization tactics, and focus instead on mutual tolerance and restraint, as in early post-apartheid South Africa under Nelson Mandela; or ii) a hegemonic party chooses to reform internally, holding its own leaders accountable and democratizing its own organizational structures. While the removal of corrupt leaders in Zimbabwe and South Africa in 2017 by their own parties theoretically holds out the latter possibility, early signs indicated that the hegemonic stance of ZANU-PF under Emmerson Mnangagwa and the ANC under Cyril Ramaphosa may continue. Likewise, as of mid-2018, the Republican Party in the United States continued to resist holding President Trump accountable for his divisive rhetoric and policy stances upending U.S. foreign policy, while it allowed the special counsel to continue its investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 elections and any collusion with the Trump campaign.
In the top, right of Figure 3, where a rough balance of electoral capacity is paired with polarization around more contemporary issues and grievances, the outcome is indeterminant. It theoretically should allow for a compromise around the polarizing issue and thus defuse the polarizing crisis. However, the outcome depends in part on the reaction of oppositions. As Slater and Arugay (2018) argue, in Indonesia and Taiwan opponents treated polarizing figures who abused executive power with patience and constraint, engaging in Madisonian tactics to check the executive through constitutional mechanisms, and thus avoid destabilizing polarizing politics.
In contrast, oppositions that weaken and divide internally, and/or engage in extra-constitutional, undemocratic attempts to remove a polarizing leader, are likely to see a counter-productive outcome as sympathy builds for the attacked leader and opposing parties fail to carry out the organizational rebuilding and voter outreach necessary to challenge the incumbent in the electoral arena. For example, over the course of the 18-year Bolivarian movement led by Chávez and Maduro, the opposition veered among extra-constitutional maneuvers, attempts at mobilizing a popular challenge in the streets and ballot box, and internal rivalries and divisions. The 2002 coup attempt against Chávez allowed him to paint his opponents and the U.S. government, who backed them as undemocratic, and they failed to defeat him electorally until his death. After uniting, the opposition finally won decisively the 2015 legislative elections. In response, Maduro resorted to increasingly undemocratic and repressive measures, backed by the military, even as the society depolarized and the vast majority turned against him. In Figure 3 Turkey is another example, where an apparent 2016 coup attempt against Erdoğan paralyzed, divided and garnered condemnation even from the opposition, and gave him an excuse to further crackdown on his opponents and purge the civil service, teachers and university professors, and courts of any suspected dissidents.
In Hungary, the opposition also engaged in polarizing tactics, with each bloc refusing to accept the other as legitimate political interlocutors. Fidesz’s early supermajority electoral win, however, in 2010 allowed it to further change the electoral laws to its advantage and cement its dominant status. The inability of opposition parties to form a single coalition impeded their ability to challenge Fidesz’s electoral dominance.
International influence can also play an important role. Greece’s EU membership and debt made it particularly vulnerable to regional pressure. Andreadis and Stavrakakis in this volume describe the Greek ambivalence toward the EU—a majority joined in blaming EU financial elites for the unpopular austerity measures, but they are divided on the question of EU membership. This helps to explain Syriza’s skirting of the issue by accepting a compromise over its debt rather than risk ouster from the EU, while continuing to blame outsiders for the difficult economic situation.
The bottom, left of Figure 3 is a null set for our study, but we might think of the short-lived democratic transition after Mubarak’s removal in Egypt as an example of a majoritarian party government under the leadership of Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood government that polarized around formative rifts related to religion and state identity. The opposition’s inability to unite and pose an electoral challenge to the Muslim Brotherhood, along with Morsi’s polarizing behavior, led the opposing political elite to support a military coup to remove Morsi from power.
The bottom, right of Figure 3 represents cases with an imbalance in electoral mobilization capacity and polarizing politics around more temporal issues such as contemporary grievances or the polarizing behavior of a populist and aggrandizing figure. The cases of Thailand and the Philippines examined in this volume fit this category, with an outcome of careening between oligarchic democracy and mass populist democracy. We expect this outcome as intra-elite power struggles play out using the different resources of democratic power—institutional horizontal accountability mechanisms and vertical electoral mobilization.
Future Research and Possible Antidotes to Pernicious Polarization
What factors might prevent self-propagating pernicious polarization? And once it is set in motion, is it possible to turn around? We have argued that pernicious polarization emerges from the interaction of grievances around representation deficits, economic inequities, or cultural clashes, and the politicization of those grievances by elites using polarizing strategies for their own purposes. As societies change by growing more racially or religiously diverse, more wealthy or unequal, or suffer crises of the economy or corruption, then perceptions of inequity or changing social status can fuel demands for change and spur the supply of polarizing leaders and parties, often by bundling populist rhetoric together with other polarizing strategies. The reaction of once-dominant groups and elites to the rise of challengers is crucial in determining the path toward polarization. As Slater notes, “Democratic stability rests upon the readiness of oligarchies to expand substantive access to the political system, not simply upon the willingness of rising opposition to ‘work within the system’” (2013, 60).
Every society and democracy has inequalities and hierarchies. If those on the bottom are allowed a political representation and respected as a challenger, rather than outright enemy, a society can have an agonistic, pluralist democracy rather than an antagonistic and polarized one (Stavrakakis 2018; Mouffe 2014). But if the newly mobilized actors take an antidemocratic and delegitimizing stance, such as European fascists did, or contemporary authoritarian populists do, or if their ascent to political power generates an antipopulist backlash, discrediting and delegitimizing the new actors, it will likely generate an irreversible logic of polarization locking in the actors. The most likely result is increased conflict and democratic erosion. Hence, the discourse, actions, and political strategies of the rising new actors as well as those shaping the backlash against them are crucial.
While our cases do not offer any definite answers as to how pernicious polarization can be prevented or reversed, they offer indirect insights we aim to explore in future research. None of our cases suggests that reactionary popular mobilization in the streets against polarizing actors with illiberal or authoritarian tendencies proved successful in achieving de-polarizing and democratizing results, at least by themselves. Judicial attempts—within constitutional boundaries—to constrain polarizing figures prone to the abuse of power are more promising for preventing severe polarization (Slater and Arugay 2018). However, our cases do not offer evidence that they can be effective in reversing polarization and democratic erosion after the onset of severe polarization, precisely because the polarized views of the constraining agents and the polarizing figure alike reduce the legitimacy of the constraint mechanisms.
Simultaneously, our analysis shows that the most severe examples of polarization followed from some elites’ reframing of their societies’ formative rifts in divisive and provocative fashions to achieve power, and from opposing elite reactions. Further, the two countries with the steepest democratic erosion resulting in authoritarian outcomes under new elites (see Figure 2) were the two with the most ideologically revolutionary aims—the inclusionary transformative cases of Erdoğan in Turkey and Chávez in Venezuela. All this suggests that the choices and strategies of incumbent and opposition elites in political and civil societies—who can act as both gatekeepers and proactive problem-solvers—can play critical roles in preventing and reversing pernicious polarization and its negative consequences for democracy. Rather than unconstitutional interventions, reactionary mass mobilization, and even legal sanctions, the most propitious strategy for prodemocratic elites appears to be developing successful electoral strategies, making programmatic and organizational internal reforms, and supporting democratizing institutional reform proposals.
South Africa, Turkey, and Greece provide useful lessons of within case variation. Despite Turkey’s long-existing formative rifts, a moderate polarization actually constituted its most promising period with respect to democracy under the AKP in 2002–2007. At that time, the AKP government subsumed its polarization around the formative rifts under a broader consensus message of EU accession (Somer, this volume). In this period, the AKP government and the opposition cooperated for EU-inspired democratic and economic reforms and the government was checked by strong—albeit semi-authoritarian—horizontal accountability mechanisms, until a constitutional crisis over the new president’s election escalated polarization. Hence, presumably, Turkey could have produced an outcome of democratic reforms if its political elites had made different choices. This could have happened, for example, if they had agreed on a president trusted by both sides and worked on democratizing the semi-authoritarian horizontal accountability mechanisms, and if the opposition had focused its energies on removing the AKP by programmatically and organizationally reforming themselves rather than, as they tried, through popular mobilization and quasi-constitutional judicial interventions.
Apartheid South Africa was democratized with institutional and electoral arrangements that carried their own seeds of both vulnerability and resistance to repolarization. Although the first post-apartheid presidency under Nelson Mandela avoided the polarizing temptation, successive leaders in the African National Congress used their dominant-party status to grow increasingly hegemonic and self-serving. As Southall points out in this volume, the ANC’s origin as a national liberation movement allowed it to conflate self-determination with democracy and to claim that it alone represented the will of the people, similar to the Bangladesh and Zimbabwe cases. The party’s comparative advantage in mobilizing voters led its political opponents to turn to horizontal accountability mechanisms—namely the courts—for redress, while ANC figures attacked the judiciary as “counter-revolutionary.” At the same time, the electoral hegemony of the ANC meant there was little political polarization and little choice in representation, making the hegemonic party-state subject to corruption and authoritarian tendencies. Consequently, Zuma’s ouster in 2017 and Ramaphosa’s early reforms held out the possibility of another potentially positive democratizing outcome—that of a hegemonic party reforming itself from within, and possibly dissolving the basis of polarization by addressing representation deficits.
Greece’s early postauthoritarian democratic politics were heavily polarized at the political and societal levels as partisans of the two major parties took on party identity as social identity. Yet Andreadis and Stavrakakis argue in this volume that this was benign polarization in that it strengthened two programmatic parties that began to converge rather than diverge. Depolarization was disrupted with the 2009 economic crisis, much like a decade earlier in Venezuela, when the two-party system in each case was blamed by voters for mismanagement and even collusion (thus too little polarization), and outsiders emerged. Syriza’s establishment-vilifying rhetoric actually masked a more complex polarization in Greece along three dimensions (austerity/anti-austerity; pro- and anti-European sentiment; and a broader consensus blaming EU actors for the painful austerity requirements). The outcome was a unique coalition of Left and Right extremes and a period of political instability. Greece’s current vulnerability is a deficit in representation of the anti-EU membership position, leaving open space for a new political actor to emerge with potentially pernicious consequences.
These cases indicate at least three potential depolarization mechanisms: democratizing internal reforms of the hegemonic party; democratizing reforms and electoral mobilization by the opposition; and pluralist political representation options for various cleavages to participate within the party system. But we need more theoretically informed and fine-tuned research on depolarization strategies in different cases. By definition, any nonpolarized democracy could offer an example where strategies of depolarization or preventing severe polarization were effectively implemented by actors representing the opposition, the government, or both. However, our cases, too, entail many opposition actors who partially or predominantly attempted to depolarize their polities with different degrees of success, such as South Africa’s Democratic Alliance (DA) or U.S. legislators who have been working across the aisle under the Obama and Trump administrations. Future research should place more emphasis on analyzing the dynamics and dilemmas of the depolarization strategies and what makes these strategies more or less successful.
Footnotes
NOTE:
The authors appreciate the research assistance provided by Sara Ali, Tahmina Rahman, and İlker Kocael.
Jennifer McCoy is a distinguished university professor of political science at Georgia State University. She is a specialist in comparative politics and democratization and Latin American politics; she coordinates the international research group on political polarization and democratic consequences. She is the author or editor of six books, the most recent being International Mediation in Venezuela (with Francisco Diez; United States Institute of Peace 2011).
Murat Somer is a professor of political science and international relations at Koç University, Istanbul. He specializes in comparative politics and democratization, and his research on polarization, religious and secular politics, ethnic conflict, and authoritarianism has appeared in books, book volumes, and journals, such as Comparative Political Studies, American Behavioral Scientist and Democratization.