Partisan Prejudice: Origins, Consequences and Remedies in European Multiparty Democracies

Project Information

PARTISAN

Grant agreement ID: 101044069

DOI

10.3030/101044069

EC signature date 8 April 2022

Start date 1 October 2022

End date 30 September 2027

Funded under

• European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 998 641,00

EU contribution

€ 1 998 641,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITAT WIEN
Austria

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - PARTISAN (Partisan Prejudice: Origins, Consequences and Remedies in European Multiparty Democracies)

Reporting period: 2022-10-01 to 2025-03-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

PARTISAN aims to investigate partisan prejudice in European multiparty systems. Partisan prejudice can be described as the extent to which citizens hold negative attitudes towards supporters of other parties. Such prejudice is widespread: many people have stereotypical views of and dislike the supporters of certain parties, sometimes amounting to outright partisan hostility. Partisan prejudice also presents a challenge for liberal democracy. It deepens societal rifts, lowers social trust, weakens the acceptance of elite compromise and leads to discrimination and social ostracism. This challenge is urgent at a time of political division and democratic backsliding, yet, partisan prejudice is barely studied, particularly in Europe.
The overall research question of PARTISAN is: What are the origins and consequences of partisan prejudice in European multiparty democracies, and how can it be reduced? More specifically, PARTISAN studies five aspects of partisan prejudice:
Prevalence (RQ1): How prevalent and how strong are partisan stereotypes and partisan prejudice in European multiparty systems?
Origins (RQ2): What are the origins of partisan stereotypes and prejudice?
Political Consequences (RQ3): What are the political consequences of partisan prejudice?
Societal Consequences (RQ4): What are the societal consequences of partisan prejudice?
Remedies (RQ5): How can the effects of partisan prejudice be reduced?
PARTISAN will provide a novel theoretical framework and rigorous empirical evidence for understanding partisan prejudice, with the ambition of fundamentally altering how voters and parties are studied in multiparty systems. The theoretical framework posits that objective characteristics of party supporters form the basis of partisan stereotypes, but that these linkages are filtered through individual perceptions and moderated by party- and country-level characteristics. Based on this framework, this project will provide ground-breaking evidence on the prevalence and origins of partisan prejudice and assess its political and societal consequences, including for political participation, discrimination and social cohesion. The project will implement new measurement tools in a cross-national survey and in experiments conducted in population-based surveys and in the field. Innovative experimental designs will be used to rigorously assess the origins and consequences of partisan prejudice, as well as potential remedies. PARTISAN will also provide political and societal actors with evidence on different ways to reduce partisan prejudice.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Data collection. Since the start of the project, we have:
• Carried out a 13-country survey, finalized in November 2024, sampled around 2,000 individuals in each country. The countries included in the survey are: Austria, Canada, Czechia, Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Turkey, UK, US, covering a wide range of political systems.
• Conducted single-purpose survey experiments in countries such as Austria, Germany and the US.

Prevalence of partisan prejudice.
• The 13-country survey provides important insights into the prevalence of partisan prejudice. We implemented innovative survey measures (see below) that allow us to describe (1) the affect, emotions, and stereotypes people hold towards other partisans and (2) the extent to which people see themselves as the target of partisan prejudice.
Origins of partisan prejudice. Since the start of the project, we have found that:
• Individuals hold systematic perceptions concerning the homogeneity and extremity of opposing party supporters,
• Party leaders shape partisan stereotypes,
• Ideological identities influence partisan affect,
• Party extremity drives partisan hostility, even in multidimensional contexts,
• Signalling cooperation with radical right parties influences partisan prejudice,
• Individuals project partisan identities onto others,
• Threat perceptions and emotional reactions affect partisan prejudice, and
• The perception of ‘feeling understood’ is associated with lower partisan prejudice.
Consequences and Remedies. Since the start of the project, we have shown that:
• Partisans whose parties form coalitions with each other show increased mutual positive affect,
• Coalition signals can reduce partisan prejudice, and
• Anti-system radical-right supporters show least support for democracy
Methodological Innovations. In terms of methodological advances, we have:
• Developed new survey measures for partisan perceptions, network heterogeneity, and perceived unfair treatment implemented in the 13-country survey,
• Implemented experimental methodologies using AI-generated images,
• Created dynamic survey environments using ChatGPT, and
• Assessed the validity of conjoint survey designs for studies of partisan affect.
Interdisciplinary Engagement
• PARTISAN team members with interdisciplinary backgrounds and co-supervision,
• Interdisciplinary international workshop scheduled for March 2025, and
• Co-organization of annual meeting of political psychologists in the DACH region.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Theoretical advances:
o An innovative set of causal explanations for partisan prejudice in a comparative, multiparty setting, including multidimensional ideological distance, the role of threat and the perception of feeling understood.
o A novel framework for understanding the relevance, origins and consequences of (perceptions of) unfair treatment based on partisanship or political views.
Methodological advances:
o Innovative, novel survey measures of theoretically relevant aspects of partisan prejudice and its consequences.
o A method of using AI tools to generate sophisticated vignette inputs to test for stereotype-based heuristics.
o Re-evaluation of the use of conjoint analyses for studying partisan prejudice.
Empirical advances:
o The 13-country survey, which will made available publicly, provides innovative and unique data on partisan prejudice in Europe and beyond.
o Survey experiments that assess the role of leadership cues in forming partisan stereotypes, the perceptions of feeling understood by others, and the role of elite coalition cues for out-partisan affect.
Unplanned/unexpected advances:
• Leadership cues: The project has not planned to consider the role of leading personnel in shaping partisan stereotypes. A leadership election in Austria in 2023 generated a set of hypotheses among the research team, which were immediately able to test by fielding two surveys of Austrian voters concerning their perceptions of the supporters of political parties. We then substantiated these findings with a survey experiment. This is an important advance beyond the state of the art, both in terms of theory and empirics, and was entirely unplanned.
• Normative implications: The project team spent early meetings discussing the normative status of partisan prejudice and its potentially relevant consequences. From these discussions, we developed a more nuanced understanding of when and why partisan prejudice is a concern. This re-evaluation of the central object of study was unplanned, and in itself represents an important contribution to the state-of-the-art.