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Emerging Issues and the Dynamics of Affective Polarization

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Affective polarization, the tendency to view political opponents with hostility, threatens democratic stability and is increasingly fueled by emerging issues such as immigration, multiculturalism, identity politics, or climate change. These issues generate moral conflict, align with partisan cues, and intensify divisions; yet, we lack understanding of how they evolve and why they polarize some contexts but not others.
I develop a dynamic, comparative account of how emerging issues drive affective polarization through their life cycles: how they emerge, gain salience, are framed by elites and media, and either fade or crystallize into lasting social divides. My innovation is threefold:
1. Parliamentary speeches, manifestos, news, and online content will be analysed by natural language processing (NLP) techniques to trace the early evolution of issues across elites, media, and citizens.
2. Panel surveys with survey experiments, combined with dynamic Bayesian networks (DBN), will model how exposure to frames and cues updates beliefs, reinforces identities, and fuels affective divides.
3. Machine learning forecasting models will identify early-warning signals of which issues are most likely to escalate into partisan conflict.
I expect moral and identity-laden issues to polarize more strongly than economic ones, with asymmetric belief updating driven by partisan identities and selective media exposure. Elite and media cues will amplify divides, while illiberal contexts are likely to accelerate polarization more rapidly than resilient democracies.
Focusing on Ireland, the Netherlands, Hungary, and Türkiye, will exploit sharp contrasts in institutional resilience and media systems. Attempting the first cross-national integration of issue life-cycle theory with NLP, survey experiments, and DBN is a high-risk endeavor. Yet it offers both a conceptual leap beyond static accounts of polarization and an empirically grounded early-warning system for democratic fragility.

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(öffnet in neuem Fenster) ERC-2025-ADG

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Gastgebende Einrichtung

KOC UNIVERSITY
Netto-EU-Beitrag
€ 2 491 656,00
Adresse
RUMELI FENERI YOLU SARIYER
34450 Istanbul
Türkei
Region
İstanbul İstanbul İstanbul
Aktivitätstyp
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
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