Definitions of Polarization

As summarized in the figure below, the most important conceptual distinctions when discussing polarization are whether one is concerned with ideological or affective polarization, and whether parties or politicians (elite level) or individual citizens (mass public) are the unit of analysis. Another subordinate classification distinguishes between horizontal, partisans disliking partisans of other parties, and vertical affective polarization, partisan disliking other parties or their elites (Röllicke 2023) . This latter distinction does have important implications for measurement.

Finally, it is worth noting that polarization can denote both a state (of divisions in society) or a process (moving towards greater divisions in society) (see also Bramson et al. 2017). Nevertheless, existing empirical measures of polarization are mostly implicitly, sometimes explicitly based on an understanding of polarization as a state. However, these measures, if measured over multiple time points, lend themselves to capturing a process of increasing, stable, or decreasing polarization.