This interview is based on Daniel Balinhas‘s article ‘Bringing critical social psychology to the study of political polarization’
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Why has polarisation become such a buzzword today?
It is hard to know exactly why some social science terms stick while others do not. I think that there are at least three aspects that have made ‘polarisation’ one of the trendiest concepts in the social and behavioural sciences.
First, the term is deeply evocative and visual, as it allows for the generation of aesthetically pleasing plots using any continuous variable that reflects opinion-based or affective differences. It also resonates with a social and political climate in which confrontation appears ubiquitous, particularly on social media and within political and institutional settings. In this sense, the concept connects with the experiences of many people who are tired of constant—and sometimes pointless—conflict in television studios or in (supra)national and regional parliaments. That is to say, ‘polarisation’ partly captures the feeling and the vibe of certain aspects that are going on in our societies.
Second, it is a concept that appears quite technical and value-free, an aspect that is particularly convenient for mainstream approaches in the social and behavioural sciences that adopt (post)positivist epistemological views, according to which the values of objectivity and a strict distance between researchers and the object(s) of knowledge are considered essential. Along these lines, for instance, studying ‘polarisation’ appears more easily as a technical issue than studying, for example, authoritarian neoliberalism, as the latter more clearly positions academics on the left of the political spectrum—an aspect which, from positivist perspectives, implies being perceived as biased.
Third, and in my view, most importantly, at the political level, ‘polarisation’ serves as a convenient diagnosis of the current situation for liberal perspectives. It evokes a scenario in which well-functioning liberal-democratic institutions are threatened by ‘the extremes’ or ‘ultra-partisans’ on both sides. From this point of view, liberal democracy can be protected by restoring civility, encouraging inter-party dialogue, and promoting more accurate perceptions and metaperceptions of the other side. If we resolve the ‘bug’—a technical problem in rational, consensual politics, exacerbated by the new communication paradigm, the affordances of social media platforms, echo chambers, and algorithmic prioritisation of emotionally salient content—then civility can be restored, and our otherwise well-functioning liberal democracies safeguarded.
However, liberal hegemony is facing more than technical challenges. Some of its problems and contradictions are fundamental. The mainstream take on polarisation conveniently overlooks the extent to which dubiously democratic practices and policymaking have expanded under consensual, technocratic neoliberal governance, often implemented by both centre-left and centre-right parties since the 1970s, and even with more intensity from the 1990s onwards. These policies have frequently lacked majority public support or, in some cases—as in the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile through a coup d’état—have even required the dismantling of democratically elected governments. That is, democratic erosion under neoliberalism began well before our current concerns with terms such as ‘populism’, ‘disinformation’, or ‘polarisation’.
Focusing exclusively on countering polarisation trends obscures how previously consensual forms of governance, embraced by both Social-democratic and Christian-democratic parties have contributed to the present polycrisis and the mainstreaming of reactionary politics. Mainstream approaches to polarisation, by capitalising on the well-founded fear of far-right politics among citizens, tend to promote a false dichotomy between liberal centrism and the far right. This narrative often tries to appeal to left-wing civil society as defenders of a deeply unequal neoliberal status quo that fails to address the key issues of our time, such as rising inequality, housing insecurity, and the ecosocial crisis. In short, the prominence of ‘polarisation’ as a leading diagnosis of our political moment seems to be part of an attempt to preserve the crumbling liberal hegemony without addressing the fundamental contradictions that have emerged at the intersection of globalised capitalism and liberal representative democracy.
It is important to remember that moral panics about conflict and polarisation have also been mobilised against left-wing parties proposing neo-reformist agendas aiming at channelling some of the demands of social movements that aimed at democratic expansion (such as the Arab Spring, the 15-M movement, Occupy Wall Street, or the Aganaktismenoi). Political projects like Podemos in Spain, Syriza in Greece, the Front Populaire in France, or Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party in the United Kingdom, apart from the classic label of ‘populists’, were all constructed as ‘polarizing’ political actors, as part of the ‘extremes’ of the political spectrum. That is, the category of ‘polarisation’ is used not only by those concerned with democratic erosion, but also by those seeking to protect ‘really existing (neo)liberalism’ from democratic critique. At a time when the category of ‘populism’ appears to be losing traction, ‘polarisation’ has emerged as a term that serves similar political purposes.
In your article, you argue that there are a number of gaps in the literature on the topic and discuss the need for a more critical approach. Could you tell us more about it?
I think there are several gaps in the literature, but in my paper, I focus on the following:
Conceptual reductionism and lack of sensitivity to the context and history of inter-group relations: There is a tendency, particularly in some branches of affective polarisation research, to reduce complex cleavages, and political conflict and antagonism more generally, to mere, often symmetric, interpersonal dislike between partisan groups. This simplification overlooks the deeper ideological, historical, and structural dimensions of political conflict, thereby flattening political disagreement into mere cognitive and emotional bias. In this sense, ‘polarisation’ is seen as the issue, when, in my view, it is the landmark indicating that there is a conflict going on. The polarisation literature has notably contributed to showing how levels of conflict in our societies have indeed grown. However, in my view, it has failed to provide a framework to understand why that is the case, and how, in particular, an increasing incapacity of our systems and their elites to deal with inequality and exclusion (oftentimes even endorsing it!) has brought us to the current ‘polarized’ times.
Methodological individualism: A prevalent reliance on survey data and survey experiments—with feeling thermometers as the main way to measure affective polarisation—treats this phenomenon exclusively as an individual-level emotional bias. This approach sidelines the collective, relational, dialogical, institutional, and structural aspects of meaning-making and political disagreement, thereby limiting our understanding of polarisation’s broader societal implications. Mainstream accounts tend to reify polarisation as an abstract and content-free attitudinal and/or emotional distance (often labelled as hostility) between political camps, arising from biased perceptions of political rivals, fostered by exaggerated partisanship or an intensified sense of belonging to sociopolitical groups. However, from less individualistic perspectives, we rarely ask what political purposes polarisation serves in context, for whom, and under what conditions. Understanding polarisation in this way enables us to distinguish democratic contestations of the status quo from anti-democratic reactions, rather than collapsing both under the same label of ‘polarisation’. To do so, the literature would benefit from a greater presence of interpretative, qualitative, and in-depth approaches to specific instances of polarisation.
In addition—and this brings me to my last point—the polarisation literature, in my view, needs to incorporate more nuanced approaches to deal with the complexity of the dichotomy between harmony and conflict, where the former is by no means universally positive and the latter is not universally negative.
Normative bias towards consensus and harmony: Much of the literature, explicitly or implicitly, automatically regards polarisation and conflict as normatively problematic, and depolarisation and social harmony as universally desirable. This overlooks the role of polarisation as the social-psychological foundation of collective engagement, and, more generally, the historical role of conflict and collective action in democratic expansion. It favours depolarisation and centrism as default solutions, independently of context. This normative bias undermines the legitimacy of many political conflicts that can play an essential role in pushing forward higher degrees of inclusion and democratic expansion.
What is our role as academics in such debates?
In my view, a first step would be to acknowledge that the knowledge we generate about people and social processes is not a reflection of ‘reality’, but when picked up by other academics, pundits, policymakers, and/or people, it provides particular tools to understand the world. That is, our disciplines, by describing specific aspects of our societies and not others, by conceptualizing social and psychological objects in particular ways, act upon the world and shape it.
A clear example of this is how knowledge generated within psychology and the behavioral sciences about individual psychology has shaped how people understand and interpret their subjective experiences, and what they interpret as (ab)normal. Also, knowledge generated, for example, in psychology or sociology, has been used to (re)produce the hegemony or particular political projects, as well as group-based inequality and domination. In psychology, IQ tests served to legitimize abhorrent theories of racial superiority. In sociology, Gustave Le Bon, in the late 19th century, systematized a theory about the irrationality of the mob that conveniently legitimized a system plagued by the exclusion of everyday people from the political arena.
By framing polarisation as a democratic illness, as an outcome of cognitive distortions and biases produced by our irrational identification with political groups (terms such as tribalism and hooliganism are quite common in the literature), and by stating that solutions should be based on inter-group contact and getting people ‘from different sides’ to like each other more, we are reproducing notions that, in my view, are far from objective.
First, group membership is envisaged as a source of ‘bias’, blind faith in leaders, and irrationality—a repertoire that resonates with Le Bonian accounts of the masses. Second, the contact solution depoliticizes inter-group conflict and leaves the power relations at play—along with a deeply dysfunctional and unfair social structure—untouched. Inter-group contact in which group differences in status and power are not acknowledged has been found to improve inter-group warmth, but at the cost of depoliticizing different forms of inequality and demobilizing those most aggrieved by structural injustice. In this way, promoting social harmony without promoting more egalitarian and fair social structures implies legitimising the status quo. Is it really that surprising that societies that are becoming increasingly polarized (in terms of economic conditions, access to essential resources, and rights) are also becoming more ideologically and affectively polarized?
Third, I think that mainstream approaches to polarisation overlook how the rights we have today in different countries—some of them constitutive of liberal democracies—were more often than not acquired through collective mass organization, popular mobilization, conflict, and pressure, not through processes in which privileged minorities came to understand that they needed to give up some of their privilege. A brief overview of the history of movements for labour rights, feminism, or anti-racism shows how conflict played a central role in the acquisition of rights.
Based on all this, I think that academics should be aware that our task is not just to describe the world, but to contribute to world-making. We should also envisage history or context not merely as a backdrop for what we are studying, but as a constitutive part of what we are studying. Lastly, we should be attentive to how the concepts we use foster specific diagnoses of the current sociopolitical times that may be more aligned with certain political projects. In other words, and more broadly, we need to be aware of how the knowledge we generate has the potential to either (re)produce or subvert power relations and structures.
In this sense, rather than amplifying moral panics against polarisation and deepening the reification of the concept, generating something like a populism 2.0, I believe critical scholarly work on polarisation should point to the system-level and structural conditions that have brought us to this point, understanding polarisation both as a process and as a symptom or reaction in the face of deeper problems and contradictions within the system. Once we take this broader and more nuanced approach, we will be better equipped to make normative judgments about the consequences of specific instances of polarisation.
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Daniel Balinhas is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Social Psychology at Limerick University and a member of the RPRN. He got his PhD in Political Psychology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. His main research interests are focused on inter-group processes and conflict, political polarization, and the study of social forces producing, developing, and sustaining group-based inequalities.
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