Polarization won't cause backsliding

There is a problem with engaging in such interventions to improve U.S. democracy, however. While affective polarization is growing quickly in the United States, it is actually not much higher there than in many European countries. In other words, many European countries show affective polarization at about the same level as that of the United States, but their democracies are not suffering as much, suggesting that something about the U.S. political system, media, campaigns, or social fabric is allowing Americans’ level of emotional polarization to be particularly harmful to U.S. democracy.16

Affective polarization is unlikely to be causing democratic backsliding or political violence on its own. The problem is not polarized emotions alone but how those feelings interact with voting systems, candidate incentives, and personal relationships.

A series of studies found that it was possible to reduce affective polarization in lab tests, though these effects were only tested after short periods. (The most successful intervention managed to reduce animosity to its 1980s level, but the effects crumbled after a week.)17 But even successful lab interventions had no effect on attitudes toward political violence and other antidemocratic behaviors. For example, experiments that reduced affective polarization among participants found no marked changes in respondents’ willingness to support their party if a candidate employed antidemocratic means to suppress the vote, redraw districts “even if it may be technically illegal,” suppress a protest by the other side, or engage in corruption.18 Reducing affective polarization also did not affect survey respondents’ loyalty to their members of Congress (who may have engaged in some of these behaviors) or increase their desire for bipartisanship. In other words, affective polarization levels describe how people feel interpersonally about the other party’s members. But those feelings do not directly influence how they may behave—they may feel more warmly toward another party but are still likely to vote the same way, support the same policy positions, and have the same levels of disrespect for democratic norms, among other behaviors.