President on honeymoon: affective polarization, Media consumption, and elections

Official URL: https://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b3422552

During the last decades, students of polarization have shown that polarization between political groups has been increasing and becoming a chronic problem. Despite the growing number of studies on the relationship between polarization and elections, there are few studies separating winners and losers in their designs. In this thesis, I evaluate how affective polarization levels of election winners and losers change after elections by employing the American National Election Study time series surveys for six different elections. The empirical analyses show that election losers become less polarized and election winners become more polarized after elections in the United States. This change is mainly coming from the increased feeling for the (newly) elected President for both groups. Moreover, this effect is conditional on consuming high levels of political content in media. However, the context of the elections, and the differences in campaigns and candidates have different influences on this effect. This counterintuitive finding offers valuable insights into addressing the issue of polarization.