Voter-party incongruence and affective polarization: A comparative appraisal

This thesis examines the relationship between party-voter congruence and affective polarization at individual and country level drawing on a cross-national dataset comprising 95 elections in 27 democracies. First part of the thesis focuses on the hypothesized relationship between party-voter congruence on the one hand and three affect measures, namely affective polarization, in-party affective evaluations and out-party affective evaluations on the other. Upon situating the notion of party-voter congruence within the literature, findings of the first chapter suggest that voter perceptions of party-voter congruence are linked to negative in-party evaluations and positive out-party evaluations, as well as significantly lower affective polarization scores at voter level. In the second part of the thesis, the existing literature on citizen-representative congruence and its possible links to affective polarization are presented. Testing the same hypotheses employed in voter-level analyses, findings in the second part of thesis suggest that increasing party-voter incongruence measured by the average distance of voters to their parties is associated with higher levels of affective polarization and more negative evaluations of other political parties. However, when congruence is measured by this average distance relative to the variance of voter self-placements in each partisan group, it is shown to curb affective polarization and yield more positive evaluations toward other parties.