https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3636-6357
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ABSTRACT
Several scholars have suggested that political dividedness has harmful effects on economic performance. Interestingly, empirical tests tackling this argument are almost entirely absent. The paper aims to fill this gap by testing the above hypothesis using data from the European Social Survey, including 27 countries between 2002 and 2015. Controlling for a range of well-known explanatory variables, the results of the panel regression analysis suggest that partisan polarisation is adversely related to economic growth, while ideological polarisation is not. The finding is congruent with the hypothesis of polarisation having a notable negative effect on growth, yet future works are necessary to test both the direction and the possible channels of causality. As scholars increasingly describe contemporary politics as an era of growing polarisation, the results imply that partisan polarisation should deserve more attention from political scientists and economists as a factor that might influence economic growth.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Some authors highlight that strong disagreement on goals and preferences prevents the politico-administrative system to give timely reactions as it often leads to gridlocks in legislation. Consequently, carrying out a necessary reform could require more time in polarized polities than in less polarized ones, that might contribute to less effective outcomes (Binder, Citation2004; Frye, Citation2010; Jones, Citation2001). This explanation, however, is concerned primarily with elite behaviour as it concentrates on the dividedness of the political elite instead of mass-polarisation.
2 For some recent examples see the radical changes of the Trump era in the US, including foreign policy, immigration policy, environmental policy and taxation, which may all be consequential for the economy. A notable part of these radical changes were quickly undone by President Biden who has started to erase much of the Trump era’s legacy on his first day of job (Shear, Citation2021).
3 It is important to note that based on the analysis of polarized cases, abuses of power from the part of incumbents is an important driver of polarisation (Carothers & O’Donohue, Citation2019; Slater & Arugay, Citation2018; Somer et al., Citation2021). That is, there seems to be a vicious circle of polarisation and abuses of power, as polarized contexts make power exceedings easier for polarizing personalitites, whose behaviour further polarize the electorate. As the accountability deficit of incumbents in a polarized context opens the room for abuses of power and makes it easier for them to remain in office, political actors benefit from their polarizing activity (Carothers & O’Donohue, Citation2019; Körösényi, Citation2013; Slater & Arugay, Citation2018; Somer et al., Citation2021).
4 The polling periods of the surveys generally took around three months, but in some cases considerably longer, and sometimes they do not end in the year when they started.
5 To measure public opinion polarisation in comparative European investigations with ESS data Kleiner (Citation2018) suggests to use a polarisation index composed by using data on opinions on income inequality, homosexuality and cultural aspects of immigration. Unlike in the original piece, here I use a country-level version of the index.
6 Interestingly, the Slovenian case of 2009 shows a rather anomalous situation. In this case the polarisation indicator is 0.56, thus the voters of the opposition were significantly more satisfied with the performance of the government than the supporters of the governing coalition.
7 The results of Frye (Citation2010) and Barro (1996) are consistent with this thesis.
8 The effect sizes showed by Model 1 are notably smaller than that of the other two models, as the crisis increased the standard deviation of real GDP growth rates.
9 Unfortunately, the unbalanced data structure does not allow us to perform a Granger test that is commonly used to test the direction of the effect.
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Veronika Patkós
Veronika Patkós is a research fellow at the Centre for Social Sciences, Institute for Political Science, Budapest; and an assistant professor at the Eötvös Loránd University. She is a recipient of the Bolyai János Postdoctoral Fellowship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Her research interests include comparative politics and voting behavior, with a special focus on mass polarization and partisanship.