Comparing stereotypes across racial and partisan lines: a study in affective polarisation

ABSTRACT

The past few decades have witnessed increasing levels of hostility among partisans, a phenomenon labelled affective polarisation. This study examines how partisan affective polarisation compares to the racial divide. We examine these differences by looking at ratings of partisan, ideological and racial outgroups on intelligence, morality, trustworthiness, hard work and patriotism. We find that individuals tend to rate their partisan and ideological ingroups more positively. More importantly, we find that the difference in ratings of ingroups and outgroups is larger for partisanship and ideology compared to racial groups.

KEYWORDS:

• Affective polarisation
• racial polarisation
• partisanship

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank Paul Sniderman for his feedback on this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 https://www.people-press.org/2016/06/22/partisanship-and-political-animosity-in-2016/.

2 Due to sample size, we cannot divide non-whites into further subgroups