Voters are angry. Not just with politics overall, or even parties they would never vote for, but increasingly with anyone who supports the parties and positions that they oppose. Working out the ingredients of this cocktail of anger is fast becoming the holy grail of political mixology. Not just what’s making so many voters in some countries so viscerally upset with their fellow citizens across the political divide – ‘affectively polarised’, to use the jargon – but why it happens more in some countries than others.
Many explanations of affective polarisation have one thing in common – the digitalisation of everything. There are two broad storylines here.
One is about social media: the ways that Twitter, Facebook and the rest reward negative emotional displays, supposedly creating ‘echo chambers’ and ‘filter bubbles’ where those negative emotions about groups with different politics can be reinforced.
