Does Affective Polarization Undermine Democratic Norms or Accountability? Maybe Not

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Scholars warn that affective polarization undermines democratic norms and accountability: they speculate that if citizens were less affectively polarized, they would be less likely to endorse norm violations, overlook copartisan politicians' shortcomings, oppose compromise, adopt their party's views, or misperceive economic conditions. We argue the contrary: affective polarization is not likely to influence political choices. We support this argument with four experiments which manipulate citizens' affective polarization with a trust game and trace downstream consequences, such as reactions to information about their representatives. In these experiments (total N=9,837), we produce the equivalent of three decades of change in affective polarization, but find no evidence that these changes influence many political behaviors---only some general questions about interpersonal attitudes. A fifth experiment (N=2,504) finds similar results with alternative manipulations of affective polarization. Our results suggest caution about assuming that reducing affective polarization would meaningfully bolster democratic norms or accountability.