Polarization through and in referendums

Funding: Emmy Noether Grant, DFG (2022–2028)

The burgeoning literature on political polarization has been applied to European multi-party systems but is still too often reduced to studying electoral politics. The causes and consequences of programmatic and affective polarization beyond the electoral arena are less well understood. This project studies polarization as it develops through and in referendums.

Direct democracy is praised for allowing citizens to put new issues on the agenda, but referendums are also criticized for reducing complex issues to a binary choice. Referendums may contribute to polarization by deepening existing political divisions and forcing a vote on a controversial issue. Furthermore, they may even create new cleavages by creating opposing camps on issues that citizens had previously thought little about.

The project addresses the overarching research question: Do referendums increase polarization, or do they simply reveal already existing rifts and cleavages in society? It examines this at two levels of analysis — the systemic and the individual — and consists of four components: a cross-national overview of polarization concepts and their relationship to referendums; new measures of issue-based affective polarization beyond party labels; a re-analysis of existing survey data on how referendum campaigns create polarization; and an original population survey on a state-level referendum in Germany.