Polarization through and in referendums: mapping polarization within and beyond the party system

• Applicant: Professor Arndt Leininger, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Political Science
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 491988424

Inspired by the evolution of increasingly partisan politics in the United States, the burgeoning literature on political polarization has been applied to European multi-party systems but is still too often reduced to studying electoral politics. The causes and consequences of programmatic and affective polarization beyond the electoral arena are less well understood. The proposed project studies polarization as it develops through and in referendums. Direct democracy is praised for allowing citizens to put new issues on the agenda, but referendums are also criticized for reducing complex issues to a binary choice. Referendums may contribute to polarization by deepening existing political divisions and forcing a vote on a controversial issue. Furthermore, they may even create new cleavages by creating opposing camps on issues that citizens had previously thought little about. By connecting referendums to polarization, the proposed project contributes to both the literature on polarization and on direct democracy, which so far have seen surprisingly little overlap. The project introduces a new and potentially important but so far overlooked determinant of polarization to the debate. Another contribution lies in further developing our understanding of polarization, which so far is conceived of in terms of divisions between parties and partisans only. The project aims at addressing the following overarching research question: Do referendums increase polarization, or do they simply reveal already existing rifts and cleavages in society? It examines this question at two levels of analysis -- the systemic and the individual level -- and consists of four components. It examines this question at two levels of analysis – the systemic and the individual level – and consists of four components. First, the project is to assemble a comprehensive overview of all available concepts of polarization, obtain and generate data on their measurement, and on referendums to scrutinize the relationship between referendums and polarization in systematic cross-national analyses. Second, it will pioneer new ways of measuring polarization beyond party labels by proposing and operationalizing the concept of issue-based affective polarization as like and dislike between groups defined by issues only. Third, the project undertakes a re-analysis of existing survey data to better understand how referendum campaigns create polarization. Fourth, an original population survey on a state-level referendum in Germany is to be fielded to put the newly developed measure of what I call issue-based polarization into practice. To summarize, the project's theoretical contribution consists of devising new measures of issue-based polarization and of developing a comprehensive theoretical account of how referendums produce polarization. Its empirical contribution lies in collecting, creating, and analyzing cross-national data on polarization and referendums as well as relevant survey data.

• DFG Programme: Independent Junior Research Groups