The relational toll of political involvement in polarized times: relationship decay within activists’ personal networks

Active political participation and engagement in collective action have generally been thought to expand activists’ social networks. However, the potential negative relational consequences of activism have seldom been examined. This article addresses this gap by assessing whether activists (citizens regularly involved in institutional or extra-institutional political activities) are more likely to experience politically motivated interpersonal conflicts with social contacts who hold different political views, and if so, why and with what consequences. For this aim, we leverage original mixed-method data from 76 personal network interviews with a diverse sample of activist and non-activist citizens in the highly polarized region of Catalonia, Spain. Results from our statistical analyses show that activists are indeed much more likely to have more damaged or broken social relationships due to political disagreement than non-activists, even after controlling for a wide range of individual and relational characteristics. This higher propensity was found among all kinds of activists, regardless of the area of activism and degree of political involvement. Using qualitative analyses of activists’ retrospective narratives of such interpersonal conflicts, we identified three causal mechanisms leading to activists’ higher relationship decay (deliberate filtering, urge for self-disclosure, and greater identity exposure) and explored the consequences that these conflictive experiences have for activists’ private and political lives, finding these to be milder than for non-activists. We argue that, under conditions of severe polarization, politically motivated relationship decay evolves from a ‘relational risk’ that activism might boost to a ‘relational toll’, a negative outcome that is almost certain to occur but that at the same time entails a moderate and somewhat acceptable cost for individual activists.