Increases and decreases in affective polarization over the past 40 years in advanced democracies

An interesting study from Boxell et al. shows that across 12 advanced democracies, affective polarization, the degree to which people feel more negatively toward other political parties than toward their own, has increased the most since the 1980s in the United States and to a lesser extent in Canada, Denmark, France, New Zealand, and Switzerland, and has decreased in Australia, Britain, (West) Germany, Japan, Norway, and Sweden. The authors derived theses conclusions from harmonizing results from 149 surveys and assembled data on economic, media, demographic, and political trends. Trends in the nonwhite share of the population and in the polarization of political elites were most strongly associated with trends in polarization of the general public.