Moving Away From Partisanship: Diversifying the Motives Behind Political Polarization

Abstract

Most current academic work on political polarization treats partisanship as the dominant motivational driver behind social cleavage and mass polarization. This essay engages in the debate by moving beyond the conceptual straitjacket of partisanship-driven polarization, recasting the primary motives behind political polarization into the three situated and interrelated ideologies that drive the phenomenon of polarization at a mass level, namely, populism, system-justifying attitudes, and state-sponsored ideologies (including religiosity and other cultural identities). By signposting more open-ended, processual, and ambivalent conceptions behind polarization, this article attempts to systematically map the alternative motives of polarization, and in doing so supplement our understanding of the deep ideological divides present not only in Western democracies, but also in many (semi-)authoritarian contexts. The article offers a point of departure for appreciating the coexistence, coevolution, and mutual constitution of the different ideological motives behind polarization, and suggests ways to develop paths to depolarization through a grounded, processual–relational analysis of the world.