What Can Depolarize the Polarizers? Affective Polarization for Party Activists Before and After Elections

Abstract

Although affective polarization threatens democracies, little is known about how to reduce it among one of polarization’s main agents: party activists. The challenge stems from the difficulty of studying activists longitudinally and in a real-world setting. To address these issues, we study whether contact between activists acting as party delegates in the precincts on election day reduces polarization, compared to activists who have other election day responsibilities. We leverage a pre-registered study of party activists in a European democracy using a difference-in-differences framework. We employ an 8300-response three-wave panel of members of a new party, collected immediately before and after the 2020 Romanian general elections. We demonstrate that party activists are affectively polarized and are mostly polarized against the out-party elites and out-party itself. Although election-day contact with out-party peers does not substantially and robustly reduce partisan animus, all activists depolarize immediately after elections and effects persist two months later.