How warm are political interactions? A new measure of affective fractionalization.

Affective polarization measures account for partisans' feelings towards their own party versus its opponent(s), but not for how likely partisans are to encounter co-partisans versus out-partisans. However, the intensity of out-party dislike and the probability with which this comes into play both determine the social impact of cross-party hostility. We develop an affective fractionalization measure that accounts for both factors, and apply it to longitudinal survey data from 20 Western publics. From this perspective, countries with fewer dominant parties may be more harmonious because partisans have lower probabilities of interacting with political opponents. At the party level, partisans of smaller, more radical parties are particularly troubled because they strongly dislike out-partisans and have few co-partisans. Affective fractionalization has increased in most Western publics over time, primarily because of growing party-system fragmentation.

The politics of social status: economic and cultural roots of the populist right.

This paper explores the factors that have recently increased support for candidates and causes of the populist right across the developed democracies, especially among a core group of working-class men. In the context of debates about whether the key causal factors are economic or cultural, we contend that an effective analysis must rest on understanding how economic and cultural developments interact to generate support for populism. We suggest that one way to do so is to see status anxiety as a proximate factor inducing support for populism, and economic and cultural developments as factors that combine to precipitate such anxiety. Using cross-national survey data from 20 developed democracies, we assess the viability of this approach. We show that lower levels of subjective social status are associated with support for right populist parties, identify a set of economic and cultural developments likely to have depressed the social status of men without a college education, and show that the relative social status of those men has declined since 1987 in many of the developed democracies. We conclude that status effects provide one pathway through which economic and cultural developments may combine to increase support for the populist right.