In DEPOLARIZE Project Selim Erdem AYTAÇ and his team aims to examine how the emotional polarization created by the antipathy, insecurity, and negative feelings developed by citizens in many countries against the supporters of political parties, which they see as opposed to their own views, affects people's democratic attitudes. The project will reveal whether emotional polarization plays a corrosive role in democracy by having a negative impact on citizens' democratic attitudes.
In 2020 AYTAÇ was awarded the TÜBİTAK Encouragement Award. His project proposal was supported within the scope of TÜBİTAK's ERC Principal Investigator Advancement Program (EBAG).
Call: ERC-2022-StG
Project Duration: 5 years
Project Acronym: DEPOLARIZE
Project Title: Affective Polarization and Democratic Attitudes
Proje ID: 101076219
Host Institution: Koc University, Turkiye
Panel: SH2 - Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems
Related ERC Proof of Concept Project: -
Does affective polarisation drive democratic backsliding?
Signs of democratic regression can be seen worldwide, and politics in many countries are increasingly marked by hostility and distrust across partisan lines. This is a phenomenon known as affective polarisation. Does this affective polarisation drive democratic backsliding? While there are several theoretical conjectures about how affective polarisation undermines democracy, there is a lack of evidence and reliable interventions. The EU-funded DEPOLARIZE project will identify reliable and generalisable experimental interventions to reduce affective polarisation in various contexts and establish any causal relationship between affective polarisation and decline in democratic attitudes. The project will produce and analyse high-quality observational and experimental data from several surveys in Hungary, Poland, Turkey and the United States.
Objective
We currently witness democratic backsliding around the world where political rights, civil liberties, and free and fair elections are under assault. At the same time, politics in many countries are increasingly characterized by hostility and distrust across partisan lines; a phenomenon called affective polarization. Could there be a causal link between the two? Despite several theoretical conjectures about how affective polarization erodes democracy through its negative effects on citizens’ democratic attitudes, we lack the evidence to support them. We also do not have reliable interventions to reduce affective polarization that are generalizable to different contexts.
DEPOLARIZE addresses these puzzles around affective polarization with two objectives. First, it will identify reliable and generalizable experimental interventions to reduce affective polarization in multiple contexts. Second, it will establish any causal relationship between affective polarization and changes in democratic attitudes through novel empirical approaches.
DEPOLARIZE will achieve these goals by producing and analysing high-quality observational and experimental data from multiple waves of surveys in Hungary, Poland, Turkey, and the US. These countries are selected for analyses because they have recently experienced democratic backsliding to different degrees, and they are also examples of high levels of affective polarization in society.
The stakes for identifying factors contributing to democratic backsliding could not be any higher. DEPOLARIZE will contribute to this effort by establishing whether affective polarization is a factor driving democratic backsliding using state-of-the-art causal inference methods. DEPOLARIZE is also one of the first projects in political science to employ comprehensive measures for cumulative learning: coordinated and comparable randomized controlled trials in multiple contexts with pre-registration of experimental interventions.
(Resource: CORDIS)
