Are Kiwi voters becoming polarised?

Trump supporters who refuse to wear masks amid a pandemic.

Brexit-backing Tories and Lib-Dem remainers.

“Red pills” and “blue pills”. World politics are becoming increasingly polarised — but is blind partisanship also spilling into New Zealand’s political life?

Researchers who pored over the views of nearly 20,000 Kiwis and found, over the past decade at least, we haven’t drifted toward polarised politics — but that could yet change.

Over recent years, psychology researchers around the world have been observing what’s called “affective polarisation” — or the tendency of people to feel positive about the party they support, while disliking and distrusting other parties.

Nicole Satherley, a doctoral candidate at the University of Auckland’s School of Psychology, said this has been especially clear in the United States, where data has shown Republicans and Democrats viewing each other with growing negativity.

Commentators have noted a massive gulf in recent job approval ratings for President Donald Trump, with a score of 91 per cent among Republicans, and just 2 per cent among Democrats.

Many of Trump’s supporters have also taken to flouting public health measures designed to prevent Covid19, with one US study calling it the “partisan pandemic”.

But Satherley explained affective polarisation was more than just plain political partisanship.

“This approach sees partisanship, or people’s long-term commitment to a political party, as reflecting a deep psychological attachment to the party, rather than a rational assessment of the party’s policies,” she said.

But she added that affective polarisation might not always be a bad thing — particularly if it meant more people turning out at polling stations.

In her study, she wanted to find out what drove some people to strongly oppose parties other than their own.

She and colleagues analysed around 19,000 survey responses from the longitudinal New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study, which has been canvassing Kiwis on various topics since 2009. One survey within the programme asked people to rate their feelings of support — or opposition — toward the main political parties in New Zealand each year.

Among the different factors looked at, the researchers found “political identity centrality” — or the extent to which people’s political preferences are central to how they see themselves — to be the biggest.

“In other words, when people’s identities are strongly invested in politics, they tend to feel more strongly about the parties they support and oppose.”

On the whole, however, the team didn’t find anything to suggest there had been growing systematic polarisation going on amid Kiwi voters over the last 10 years.

Why the difference with the US? Satherley said it could be a combination of factors, such as partisan news sources and New Zealand’s very different media landscape, how political elites in each country behave, and even differences in the party systems more broadly.

“However, research on affective polarisation is still in its early years, and these are speculative possibilities,” she said.