Political polarization between Americans stays consistent before and after elections

During election season, when campaign ads dominate TV, political billboards dot highways, and canvassers knock on doors, the implication is that political tensions are at their highest and will surely drop once elections are over.

A new study from Annenberg School for Communication researchers Neil Fasching and Yphtach Lelkes titled "Persistent polarization: The unexpected durability of political animosity around U.S. elections," published in Science Advances, finds that is not the case anymore. Political polarization remains consistently high before, during, and after the elections, even during contentious times.

"Scholars have widely accepted that as elections draw near and campaigning reaches a fever pitch, affective polarization increases, only to recede in the days and weeks following the election," says Lelkes, associate professor of communication. "But in the current moment, even a contentious election season doesn't ramp political animosity up or down."

Using a dataset of 66,000 interviews with Americans, Lelkes, Fasching, and colleagues gauged the level of partisan animosity between Democrats and Republicans in the days before and after the 2022 midterms.

The authors find that support for democratic norm violations, such as reducing the number of polling stations in areas dominated by the other party; support for political violence, like hurting a protester from the other party; and affective polarization, an overall measure of how negatively or positively Democrats and Republicans feel toward the other party, hardly changed from the pre-election period to the post-election period.

The study also finds that voters with more exposure to campaigns tend to be more polarized, but the difference in polarization remained constant.

Read more at Annenberg School for Communication.