This interview is based on Juan Roch, Daniel Balinhas and Aurelien Mondon’s article, “A critique of the polarisation narrative: expanding the limits of democracy, parties and political participation”
Roch, J., Balinhas, D. & Mondon, A. A critique of the polarisation narrative: expanding the limits of democracy, parties and political participation. Contemp Polit Theory 25, 5 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-025-00779-4
This interview was conducted by Alex Yates.
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In this article you critique the mainstream polarisation narrative. What is this narrative, and why do you understand it as a hype?
Thanks for this very good question. By polarisation narrative, we refer to a constellation of discourses—including media coverage, public commentary, academic research, and policy-oriented master frames—that converge around a shared understanding of what polarisation is and how it relates to democracy. In the article, we document the growing prominence of references to polarisation, both in public media and within academic debates, using empirical indicators that show a marked increase in “text and talk” on the issue. We argue that this narrative operates as a political dispositive, that is, as a specific diagnosis that defines the nature of the contemporary “crisis of democracy” and circumscribes the range of legitimate solutions.
Basically, this narrative situates polarisation as the key central problem, understood primarily as the widening distance between political extremes and the spread of affective polarisation—usually defined as people’s increasing divergence in their feelings toward political ingroups vis-à-vis political outgroups. This, it is argued, impacts the cohesion and civility of our democracies by obstructing communication, deliberation, and compromise, thereby preventing democratic systems from functioning effectively with a critical yet constructive public and electorate.
We contend that this narrative is hyped and analytically limiting. It is hyped because polarisation is disproportionately positioned at the centre of contemporary democratic challenges, and its societal and political effects are often exaggerated. More importantly, this framing obscures deeper and more structural problems affecting democracy and risks misdirecting efforts toward meaningful democratisation. Indeed, we argue that a certain degree of polarisation—what we conceptualise as democratising polarisation—is not only inevitable but necessary in the current political context. We contend that if we focus on polarisation as the primary problem, the dominant narrative diverts attention from other central dynamics, including processes of oligarchisation, democratic hollowing, rising social and economic inequality, and the broader reactionary wave shaping contemporary politics.
You explain that when liberals use the polarisation narrative, presenting centrist elites as a healthy middle between extremes on the left and right, they often end up actually favouring the far right. How does this process play out?
The polarisation narrative’s core claim states, through a conveniently ahistorical lens, that division, intergroup conflict, incivility, exacerbated partisanship, and ideological or party-based “tribalism” — and so on and so forth — are central elements compromising democracy. If these are the problems democracies are undergoing, then the reduction of intergroup conflict, the restoration of civility, and the search for centrist (sometimes misleadingly labelled “non-ideological”) consensus, leading to social harmony, are posed as solutions.
The problem with these ahistorical accounts is that, among other things, they obviate two very important aspects:
- Processes of democratic erosion started decades ago under neoliberalism, well before the current widespread concerns about polarisation. Interestingly, in many countries, these processes of erosion of key democratic mainstays occurred at times of elite-level “centrist” consensus (the so-called Third Way) and high levels of mass depoliticisation.
- Processes of democratic expansion in history, which resulted in many of the rights and protections taken for granted in liberal societies, did not stem solely from consensus, technocratic management, or elite-level negotiation, but from a radical politicisation of social issues (inequality, segregation, exploitation, exclusion). These processes involved periods of conflict, polarisation, and, at times, even revolutionary mobilisation.
Liberal elites often mobilise this ahistorical polarisation narrative because, on the one hand, it downplays their involvement in processes of democratic erosion and their role in enabling neoliberal “centrist” policies over recent decades that have led to the current context of polycrisis. By not acknowledging their responsibility for present material and structural conditions, and by prioritising depoliticisation, moderation, and consensus as responses to polycrisis, liberal elites end up narrowing the space for democratic disagreement while leaving intact the conditions in which far-right politics can flourish. In this way, the polarisation narrative indirectly benefits the far right by displacing attention from power dynamics, oligarchisation, shrinking sovereignty, democratic hollowing, and rising social and economic inequality — all of which constitute structural roots of today’s societal conflicts — and by recasting political conflict itself as the central democratic problem. At the same time, the polarisation narrative places particular pressure on actors who seek to politicise and transform these structural conditions through social and political movements aimed at democratic expansion, as their demands are often framed as contributing to polarisation — discursively equated, in much the same way as the far right’s exclusionary agenda — rather than as expressions of democratic contestation. By equating very different contestations of the status quo through the polarisation narrative, the latter is defended while avoiding a deep and serious analysis of the current state of our democracies.
You discuss how would-be ‘depolarisers’ emphasise the importance of ‘concrete issues’ rather than divisive politics. What counts as a ‘concrete issue’ for these actors? How are some demands excluded?
First, the very framing of politics in terms of discrete, “concrete issues” is itself problematic. This is a reductionist view on politics, overlooking its broader dimensions in which political demands are not simply given but are embedded within collective identities, processes of mobilisation, and struggles over meaning—elements that constitute the very foundation of political life. To conceive politics and party politics as a mere aggregation of policy demands is therefore deeply limiting from a democratic perspective.
Moreover, as you suggest, those concrete issues tend to be prefabricated within the boundaries of the status quo. Alternative or emancipatory demands, by contrast, are not given a priori but emerge through political struggle, and as such are systematically marginalised. As a result, the political claims of excluded or subaltern social groups are frequently rendered invisible or excluded from legitimate political contestation.
There are several mechanisms through which this exclusion operates. First, the form and modes of expression of such demands are often delegitimised: because they are not articulated in the recognised language of “concrete issues,” they can be dismissed as emotional, irrational, or insufficiently policy-oriented. Second, unequal access to economic and cultural resources (crucial for entry into public and political spheres) places subaltern groups at a structural disadvantage in articulating and disseminating their claims. Finally, even when these demands do gain entry into political debate, they frequently encounter a further barrier in the form of mainstream political actors, who deploy labels such as “polarising” or “extremist” to neutralise and contain them, not to mention the use of extra-legal means to exclude them altogether.
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Juan Roch is a Ramón y Cajal research fellow at the Department of Political Science and International Relations of Universidad Autónoma de Madrid since December 2025. Between September 2024 and December 2025, he was an assistant professor of political science at National University of Distance Education (UNED, Madrid). He was previously a postdoctoral researcher at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, the University of Hildesheim in Germany and a visiting professor at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. He holds a PhD in Political Science from the Free University of Berlin and has been a visiting researcher at the University of Berkeley in 2019 and at the European University Institute in Florence in 2023. He is also co-convenor of the international working group Populism Specialist Group which is part of the Political Studies Association. His research interests focus on far right politics, populist and nationalist discourses, the crises of the European Union, and the study of legitimacy in contemporary liberal democracies. He has published in international journals such as the Journal of Common Market Studies, European Political Science Review, Political Studies, Journal of European Integration, or South European Society and Politics. He is also the author of the books The populism-Euroscepticism nexus: A discursive comparative analysis of Germany and Spain (Routledge, 2023) and ¿Polarizados o paralizados? Surgimiento y transformaciones del movimiento democrático (Tecnos, 2025).
Daniel Balinhas is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Social Psychology at Limerick University. 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.
Juan and Daniel are members of the RPRN.
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