Political and affective polarisation is reshaping democracies worldwide, eroding trust, cooperation and the conditions for meaningful democratic dialogue. Polarisation is a complex, multifaceted phenomenon whose capacity to intensify cleavages and reframe democratic spaces is not tied solely to specific issues, such as climate change, or to the political positioning of parties and candidates. Measuring polarisation is an essential step towards understanding it and, in turn, identifying effective pathways to depolarisation.
These issues were explored in two subsequent panels organised by Yanina Welp, Research Fellow at the AHCD, Natalia Araguete, Professor at CONICET–Argentina and Palmira Chavero Ramirez, Professor at FLACSO Ecuador. As part of their pilot project Democratising Public Debate, supported by the Swiss Leading House Latin America, their goal is to develop a diagnostic matrix for assessing political polarisation. The multidimensional framework attempts to measure distances between political, ideological and affective aspects of polarisation, using Argentina and Ecuador as case studies.
The conceptualisation is built around a series of analytical questions around 1) the mechanisms connecting actors, practices and relations, 2) the conditions that reinforce cleavages and 3) the conditions conducive to actual disputes. This matrix makes it possible to develop comparable explanations, drawing on two contrasting country case studies. Additional insights to the first panel were provided by AHCD Research Fellow Laura Bullon-Cassis, drawn from the Youth Climate Activism and Local Institutions project.
The second panel was moderated by Graziella Moraes Silva, Co-Director of the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy, also a PI of the Democratising Public Debate project. The invited scholars discussed further how disagreements in political and affective polarisation are interrelated and how they become a form of delegitimising political opponents. Their study suggests that extremely polarised people tend to be overrepresented in public discourse, and that education level increases do not necessarily lead to less polarisation.
To close the second roundtable session, two discussants, Juan Huitzilihuitl Flores Zendejas, Professor at the Department of History, Economics and Society at the University of Geneva and Maxime Walder, Maître Assistant at the University of Geneva, highlighted strengths, weaknesses and avenues for refinement of the assessment framework.