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Replication Data for: Does Affective Polarization Undermine Democratic Norms or Accountability? Maybe Not

Harvard Dataverse (Africa Rice Center, Bioversity International, CCAFS, CIAT, IFPRI, IRRI and WorldFish)

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Title Replication Data for: Does Affective Polarization Undermine Democratic Norms or Accountability? Maybe Not
 
Identifier https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/3AOBP2
 
Creator Broockman, David
Kalla, Joshua
Westwood, Sean
 
Publisher Harvard Dataverse
 
Description Scholars warn that affective polarization undermines democratic norms and accountability: they speculate that if citizens were less affectively polarized, they would be less likely to endorse norm violations, overlook copartisan politicians' shortcomings, oppose compromise, adopt their party's views, or misperceive economic conditions. We advance reasons to doubt that affective polarization influences political choices. We support this argument with five experiments which manipulate citizens' affective polarization with multiple approaches. We then trace the downstream consequences of manipulating citizens' affective polarization, such as their reactions to information about their actual representatives in Congress. In our experiments (total N=12,341$, we `rewind' the equivalent of three decades of change in affective polarization, but find no evidence that these changes influence many political behaviors---only general questions about interpersonal attitudes. Our results suggest caution about assuming that reducing affective polarization would meaningfully bolster democratic norms or accountability.
 
Subject Social Sciences
Affective polarization
Political polarization
Democratic accountability
Democratic norms
 
Contributor Broockman, David