The Symbolic Organisation of Political Antagonism: An Integrative Model of Cultural and Social Polarisation

This article develops a cultural and relational model of political polarisation that integrates insights from currently disconnected streams of scholarship to conceive polarisation as a discursive and preformative struggle over sacred meanings. Rather than treating polarisation as mere attitudinal divergence, we frame it as the symbolic organization of political antagonism. We identify three interrelated cultural dimensions and one social dimension. These are (1) ideological divergence as bifurcating responses to contested issues, conceptualized as morally and emotionally charged signifiers; (2) the ideological consistency of these divergent issues, enabling chains of signification held together by what we call ‘linking signifiers’ that mark group identity; (3) the mutual constitution of opposing semiotic chains and identities, which describes how antagonistic groups performatively mobilise opposing discourses to co‐constitutively define themselves in relation to one another; and (4) social polarisation , which is based in for example, inequalities, segregations, or violent conflicts. We then present a pathway model which expresses how cultural and social polarisation drive or diminish one another over time. This model thereby offers a sociological theory of polarisation and depolarisation as interlinked processes rather than as separate phenomena requiring separate theories. This paper also maps out the implications of our model for empirical polarisation and depolarisation research.