Understanding contemporary political division in Western Europe: a multidimensional approach

Recent years have seen an entrenchment of partisan and ideological division across Western European democracies, with pernicious consequences. As cultural conflicts over questions of immigration divide electorates, urgent political challenges like climate change go unresolved in the face of political disagreement, and inter-group hostility undermines efforts to achieve democratic consensus, we appear to be entering a new age of political conflict with worrying implications for democracy. Yet, whilst these processes of polarization have been the subject of a prolific stream of research in recent years, there remains scope for additional contributions.

Research on social division and political polarization often approaches the phenomenon from a macro-level perspective that emphasises the impact of socio-economic transformation, or from a micro-level perspective that emphasises the importance of individual-level psychological mechanisms in driving polarization. This thesis instead adopts a multidimensional approach to explain political polarization and division, examining how context – encompassing both immediate factors in the individual’s local environment and broader characteristics – influences and interacts with these individual-level processes. This approach, synthesizing micro- and macro-level explanations, offers new avenues to better understand an increasingly prescient threat to democratic health.

Using data from Britain and Norway, this thesis focuses on three different sources of partisan and attitudinal division: first, authoritarianism and conflicts over cultural issues; second, climate change and responses to exogenous shocks an; third, the emotion of anger. Moving beyond the individual dimension, however, each study examines how these micro-level processes are influenced by contextual factors, encompassing the political information environment, partisan-ideological sorting and political discussion networks. Taken together, findings demonstrate the importance of context in shaping processes of polarization. In doing so, they highlight the characteristics of contemporary Western European democracies that are exacerbating these attitudinal divides - including increasingly sorted and geographically polarized electorates - and point to potential avenues for mitigating polarization.