Science explores polarized politics
Some look to humanity’s evolutionary past in effort to explain growing divisions
ATKINSON, N.H. — As the 2024 primary season revs up, and with the political stakes this year extraordinarily high, voters are both polarized and hardly budging. Pundits expect another close election that’s a repeat of 2020. There’s not a lot of wobble on either left or right.
Social scientists have taken note of the hardening political divisions. One theme emerges in much of the research: Our politics tend be more emotional now. Policy preferences are increasingly likely to be entangled with a visceral dislike of the opposition. The newly embraced academic term for this is “affective polarization.”
“It’s feelings based,” said Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University and author of Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity. “It’s polarization that’s based on our feelings for each other, not based on extremely divergent policy preferences.”
The tendency to form tightly knit groups has roots in evolution, according to experts in political psychology. Humans evolved in a challenging world of limited resources in which survival required both cooperation and identifying the rivals for those resources.
“The evolution of cooperation required out-group hatred. Which is really sad,” said Nicholas Christakis, a Yale sociologist and author of Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society.
That is just as true on today’s political stage. There are two major parties, and their contests are viewed as zero-sum outcomes. No researcher argues human nature is the sole, or even the primary, cause of today’s polarization. But savvy political operatives can exploit, leverage and encourage it. And those operatives are learning from their triumphs in divide-and-conquer politics.
“We wouldn’t have civilizations if we didn’t create groups. We are designed to form groups, and the only way to define a group is there has to be someone who’s not in it,” Mason said.
What’s most striking is in the process of defining who is in and who is out of a group, enmity and derision can arise without any rational reason.
The American political system may cultivate “out-group” hatred, as academics put it. One of the scarce resources in this country is political power at the highest levels of government. The country has no parliamentary system in which multiple parties form governing coalitions. Redistricting ensures there are fewer competitive congressional races. The two parties have inexorably moved further apart ideologically, and leaders are more likely to be punished — “primaried” — if they reach across the aisle. And because many more districts are now deeply red or blue, rather than a mix of constituencies, House members have fewer reasons to adopt moderate positions.
Research shows affective polarization is intensifying across the political spectrum. Recent survey data revealed more than half of Republicans and Democrats view the other party as “a threat,” and nearly as many agree with the description of the other party as “evil,” Mason said.