The Age of Hostility: Understanding the Nature, Dynamics, Determinants, and Consequences of Citizens' Electoral Hostility in 27 Democracies

Project Information

ELHO

Grant agreement ID: 788304

DOI

10.3030/788304

EC signature date 19 July 2018

Start date 1 April 2019

End date 30 September 2026

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 2 499 838,00

EU contribution

€ 2 499 838,00

Coordinated by

LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE
United Kingdom

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - ELHO (The Age of Hostility: Understanding the Nature, Dynamics, Determinants, and Consequences of Citizens' Electoral Hostility in 27 Democracies)

Reporting period: 2023-10-01 to 2025-03-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

“ELHO – The Age of Hostility” is an ambitious, and innovative cross-methodological investigation into the rising phenomenon of electoral hostility around the democratic world. Why do so many people hold negative feelings towards those they believe vote differently from them? What are the psychological phases of hostility – from misunderstanding and frustration to contempt and hatred? What is the cycle of hostility when does it crystallise and deteriorate? And how can it be worsened or improved by legal, electoral, and political organisation and behaviour?

Electoral disagreements have long been seen as results of social divisions, but recent research shows that they have become a basis of antagonism in their own right in countries such as the UK and the US. In the UK Brexit Referendum, for example, 51% of citizens felt anger towards opposite voters and 46% disgust. ELHO defines electoral hostility as negative feelings (frustration, anger, contempt, disgust) held towards individuals or groups as a result of their effective or perceived electoral preferences. It may occur in the campaign, post-election, and reinforce into self-perpetuating cycles of hostility as it is structured as a Mokken scale which can become ‘stages’ of hostility. While scepticism of political elites is well-studied, hostility towards fellow voters takes electoral negativity to a new level. Electoral hostility may have far reaching consequences, leading citizens to resent one another due to electoral stances and drift apart in increasingly divided societies, but also to the delegitimization of electoral outcomes and negative attitudes towards solidarity.

ELHO will answer the following research question: What are the causes and consequences of electoral hostility at individual, group, and aggregate levels and how does it develop over time? The project’s innovative methods combine a 27 country multi-level panel survey, visual, physiological and field experiments, election diaries, family focus groups, a scoping survey of Election Management Bodies, and campaign and atmosphere coding. The project will also explore possible mitigation in ambitious partnership with psychiatrists, ergonomists, lawyers, EMBs and IGOs creating a new Electoral Psychology Observatory.

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

In May 2019, EPO and Opinium launched the Hostility Barometer series in the UK. In 2020, we extended the series to include the USA. Hostility Barometer UK has had 5 waves, while Hostility Barometer USA has had 2 waves. The Hostility Barometer tracks levels of hostility amongst British and American citizens, perceptions of electoral atmosphere, levels of democratic frustration as well as their expectations about the future and the consequences of electoral hostility on their everyday attitudes, interactions, and behaviours, from Christmas dinner to family life and the atmosphere of the workplace.

In 2019 we launched the EPO website, where we we host our interactive Almanac of Electoral Ergonomics, and regularly share reports on the findings of our Hostility Barometer, and update users on our forthcoming events and publications.

We have conducted the pilot interviews and family focus groups with First Time Voters in Israel in 2019 (5 interviews), Indonesia in 2019 (9 interviews) and the UK in 2020 (13 interviews so far) and plan to continue fieldwork in 2022, expanding this project with 30 interviews in Australia (which have begun, with 1 pilot interview conducted in 2019), the UK and the USA.

Alongside the Hostility Barometer we have collected additional quantitative data including;
- Surveys of the general population in the 2019 South African, Australian, and British General Elections, the 2020 US Presidential Election (samples of approximately 2,000 respondents per country), and the 2021 Japanese election, and 2022 French election. We plan to conduct further surveys for the 2022 US midterm elections.
- Surveys of first time voters in the same four countries as above (using over-sampling boosts of approximately 500 respondents per country)

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)

ELHO will enable us to have a better understanding of how electoral hostility develops as a psychological and emotional cycle and how electoral hostility is affected by contexts of external threats such as pandemics, environmental disasters or terror risks.

Through ELHO, our team has made great strides in terms of modelling and measuring electoral atmosphere, electoral ergonomics, hopelessness, and electoral hostility. These are major breakthroughs, leveraging techniques from the field of
psychology to derive a more precise, analytical and explanatory model and proposing an alternative approach to the affective polarisation model. By leveraging a cross-disciplinary approach, we are building a better understanding of
citizens' desire for new forms of democracy/innovation through collaborative democracy. This has helped us in garnering an understanding of how citizens want elections to be adapted to major external threats (pandemics, terrorism, environmental disaster). This was new and was unexpected, as we attempt to adapt our work to the Covid context.

ELHO will enable us to better understand how electoral hostility can emerge among first time voters and young citizens, by also considering the role of the atmopshere in elections by pionnering new multiple methods and metrics including some which are very rarely used together in the literature.
Our research has utilized several novel methodological techniques, leveraging mixed methods, combining rigorous
quantitative and qualitative methodological techniques to derive more substantively nuanced and statistically precise
findings. As part of our work we have begun developing new cross disciplinary research projects with architects,
museum designers and representatives from charities working with disabilities to develop ideas on how to best
design an ideal polling station. This has included a number of collaborative meetings online.

ELHO is moving beyond the state of the art by considering non-traditional contexts which might create atmospheres of hostility, such as tik tok, through the use of digital ethnographies and participant observation.
We have conducted new exploratory research on measuring electoral atmosphere in public opinion, media, and social media and
assessing its evolution in the election cycle. Finally, exploratory innovation research on inventing new forms of
collaborative democracy enabling citizens to express their thoughts in their own words on any question of interest to
them and deriving collective decisions from those using artificial intelligence and semantics analysis. Note that this was part of a presentation to the European Commission and leaders from Election Management Bodies from most EU Member States in June 2021.

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