Relative out-party hostility and its consequences in multiparty democracies

IF 2.9 2区社会学 Q1 POLITICAL SCIENCE

Electoral Studies Pub Date : 2025-03-26 DOI:10.1016/j.electstud.2025.102924

Melek Hilal Eroglu

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Abstract

How extensive and intense is out-party hostility in contemporary multiparty democracies, and what are its consequences for democratic attitudes, political engagement, and voting behavior? While previous studies have highlighted increasing trends in such hostility, existing measures of the concept fall short in three key respects: they fail to account for the breadth and intensity of hostility in multiparty systems, they do not offer a singular measure for overall hostility, and they do not account for the relative prevalence of negative versus positive party affect. This paper introduces a new measure, ‘Relative Hostility’ to overcome these limitations. Using data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) across 48 multiparty democracies, this study compares the effects of ‘Relative Hostility’ with those of existing measures of out-party hostility and Affective Polarization on democratic attitudes, support for extremism, and political participation. The findings demonstrate that ‘Relative Hostility’ more accurately explains the adverse effects on democracies, such as increased dissatisfaction with democracy and support for extremist parties. These findings underscore the urgent need for developing strategies that mitigate out-party hostility to bolster democratic resilience.

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来源期刊

Electoral Studies POLITICAL SCIENCE-

CiteScore

3.40

自引率

13.00%

发文量

审稿时长

67 days

期刊介绍： Electoral Studies is an international journal covering all aspects of voting, the central act in the democratic process. Political scientists, economists, sociologists, game theorists, geographers, contemporary historians and lawyers have common, and overlapping, interests in what causes voters to act as they do, and the consequences. Electoral Studies provides a forum for these diverse approaches. It publishes fully refereed papers, both theoretical and empirical, on such topics as relationships between votes and seats, and between election outcomes and politicians reactions; historical, sociological, or geographical correlates of voting behaviour; rational choice analysis of political acts, and critiques of such analyses.