Affective Partisan Polarization and Citizens' Attitudes and Behavior in Swiss Democracy

Benjamin Jansen and Alois Stutzer

Working papers from Faculty of Business and Economics - University of Basel

Abstract: There is a concern that citizens with different political positions and party affiliations increasingly dislike each other. We examine this affective polarization (AP), which is often associated with a weakening of democracy, in the context of Switzerland's multiparty landscape with proportional governmental representation. Evaluating the long-term development of AP in Switzerland with both historical and newly gathered data for 2023, we find hardly any considerable change in AP over the last three decades, except for a substantial jump between 1999 and 2003 and a generally lower level of party sympathy in 2023. Complementary, our analysis of split-ticket voting behavior in national parliamentary elections with continuous data back to 1983 does not support any trend in partisan polarization from a voters' revealed preference perspective. We further find that more affectively polarized individuals report, on average, lower satisfaction with democracy but show a higher willingness to participate in politics across a wide range of different forms of political engagement, even when controlling for individuals' general sympathy towards political parties.

Keywords: affective polarization; political participation; political discussion; latent candidacy; splitticket voting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-05-14
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-pol
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bsl:wpaper:2024/04

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