Differential political polarisation

Here’s something:

Recent research spells out that the US is an outlier on polarisation, defined as the extent to which you feel more negatively towards political parties other than the one you support.

Examining 12 OECD countries over the past four decades, it confirms the US’s polarisation surge. But there was no uniform pattern. Five countries (including France and Switzerland) had more modest increases, while six saw polarisation fall back, including Germany and the UK.

And:

Brexit was polarising but those claiming Britain’s party politics is unusually divided today have forgotten a lot about the 1980s, including the miners’ strike. Seeing the British electorate as two immovable blocks of support for Labour and Conservative is strange when voters handed the Tories their biggest victory since Thatcher in 2019, but are now on track to give Labour a thumping win. Just because we’re having our election at the same time as the US doesn’t mean our politics has much in common. The defining feature of British voters? Not that they’re polarised, but that they’re pissed off and volatile.

That last rings true. There are clearly elements of political discourse which are profoundly antagonistic to others, but the ruptures, while very real, don’t appear – at least not from this remove, to be near systemic in the way that seems correct with regard to certain structures in the US. 

And the same is true here to an even greater extent given that we didn’t have to endure Brexit. But that’s not to say there’s no hostility – we see this on our streets and on social media in a particularly pointed form in recent times. The thought re the 1980s is well made. One of the most irksome tropes in Irish politics is the idea that civility broke down around the time Sinn Féin and others entered Leinster House in the contemporary period, but this is a nonsense. Bitter hostility characterised the relations between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael supporters throughout most of my adult life until quite recently – and I’ll bet they still exists in some form or another. That history seems to have been largely expunged from the record in recent times. Perhaps part of that was generational, but I wonder. Expediency no doubt. Haughey/FitzGerald. Even Ahern and others. And let’s not ignore the fall out from the Civil War. 

And that’s just political polarisation. But consider abortion, divorce. We’ve had our Brexits, had a number of them, over the years. Perhaps polarisation ebbs and flows?