Affective Polarization: When Political Disagreement Becomes Personal

Political disagreement is normal. People disagree about taxes, immigration, abortion, guns, foreign policy, economic regulation, the environment, and almost every other question government attempts to resolve. Healthy skepticism allows an idea to be challenged without condemning the person who holds it. Political disagreement becomes something different when opposition to ideas turns into hostility toward people.

Brian Kogelmann and Paul Wheatley define affective polarization as the tendency of people who identify with a political party to view members of their own party positively and members of opposing parties negatively. The phenomenon concerns emotion rather than disagreement itself. People become angry with, resentful of, disgusted by, or contemptuous of people on the other side. Political identity begins to function like membership on opposing teams.

This distinction is important. Two people can disagree strongly while remaining friends and respecting each other's character. Affective polarization appears when the identity of the opponent begins to produce hostility independently of what that particular person has said or done.

Kogelmann and Wheatley examine whether such hostility is rational. Their answer is generally no. They reach that conclusion using two established theories of rational emotion: cognitive rationality and instrumental rationality. An emotion can be rational because it fits the facts, or because it helps a person efficiently accomplish a goal. Affective polarization generally fails both tests.

From Political Opposition to “Evil”

The seriousness of affective polarization appears early in the paper:

“Most alarmingly, a November 2017 survey found that just over 60 percent of partisans believed opposing partisans are ‘a serious threat to the United States and its people’; 40 percent said opposing partisans are ‘evil’; and 20 percent said members of the opposing party ‘lack the traits to be considered fully human – they behave like animals’ (Kalmoe & Mason 2022: 44–45).”

These words, and especially the ones in bold type, deserve attention.

A person can describe a policy as harmful and provide evidence of the harm. A politician can be accused of lying, fraud, coercion, corruption, or violence, with evidence offered for the accusation. Such statements describe conduct that can be investigated.

Calling political opponents evil is much less precise. The word transforms disagreement about behavior or policy into a judgment about the person, often without specifying the conduct that warrants the label.

“Behave like animals” goes further. Human beings are animals in the biological sense, so that is obviously not the intended meaning. The expression rhetorically places the opposing partisan outside the speaker's ordinary conception of humanity. The person becomes a member of a morally inferior category.

This is a remarkable transformation. A stranger about whom very little is known becomes threatening, evil, or less than fully human because of a political label.

The survey was from 2017, but the emotional division it describes has not disappeared. In a more recent September 2025 Pew Research Center survey, 81 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents said the Republican Party made them feel angry, while 70 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said the same about the Democratic Party. Pew was measuring feelings toward the parties rather than every individual member of the opposing party, so the measures are not identical. The findings nevertheless show that strong negative partisan emotion remains prominent in American politics.

Kogelmann and Wheatley’s paper, The Rationality of Affective Polarization, addresses this recognizable feature of contemporary political life.

The Ordinary Voter

The authors narrow their argument to an especially interesting case. Their subject is the ordinary voter rather than the politician, activist, party official, or ideological leader.

Imagine encountering someone with a Republican bumper sticker or a Democratic campaign sign. You have never met this person. You know almost nothing about his beliefs, character, motives, education, experiences, or reasons for voting as he does.

Is his party affiliation sufficient reason to dislike him?

That is the central problem Kogelmann and Wheatley examine. Their rank-and-file partisan votes regularly and consumes political news but participates relatively little beyond that. The authors deliberately focus on people whom the observer has never met and probably never will.

This restriction gives their argument considerable force. There may be excellent reasons to condemn a particular politician or activist whose conduct is known. The anonymous voter presents a different evidentiary problem. Party affiliation tells us something, but considerably less than affective polarization assumes.

Cognitively Rational Emotions

The first theory concerns cognitive rationality.

An emotion is cognitively rational when it is an appropriate response to its object. Fear is appropriate when danger is real and proportionate to the fear. Resentment can be appropriate when someone knowingly mistreats us. Contempt may be appropriate when reliable evidence establishes a serious defect of character.

Kogelmann and Wheatley draw on two philosophical traditions to identify circumstances in which antagonistic emotions can be fitting. One concerns bad character; the other concerns culpable harm.

Applied to politics, either route could potentially justify hostility toward an opposing partisan.

The first possibility is that belonging to the opposing party reveals bad character. A Democrat might believe that Republican policies are cruel or unjust. A Republican might believe that Democratic policies are immoral or destructive. If support for a genuinely terrible ideology indicates bad character, contempt might appear justified.

The difficulty comes from the enormous amount of information being inferred from the political label.

How Much Ideology Does the Average Voter Actually Have?

Kogelmann and Wheatley rely heavily on the work of political scientist Philip Converse and the research tradition that followed him. Converse argued that many ordinary voters possess far less coherent political ideologies than political elites, activists, and intellectuals tend to assume.

Political beliefs among ordinary voters can be unstable. Positions change. Answers vary depending upon wording. People frequently take cues from political leaders. Party loyalty may precede policy preference rather than result from it.

Kogelmann and Wheatley consequently challenge the assumption that an ordinary Republican necessarily possesses a coherent conservative ideology or that an ordinary Democrat necessarily possesses a coherent liberal ideology. They state their conclusion forcefully: most rank-and-file partisans probably do not actually believe the elaborate ideologies attributed to their parties.

This creates a basic problem for affective polarization.

A political label is being used as evidence for beliefs that the individual may not hold.

The error becomes larger when beliefs attributed to the group are converted into judgments about individual character.

Repeating the Party Line

There is a possible reply. Even if ordinary voters lack coherent ideologies, they often repeat the language of their political leaders. Perhaps parroting an objectionable political position is itself evidence of bad character.

Kogelmann and Wheatley answer with what they call the hypocrisy constraint.

People are poor judges of others when condemning a failing to which they themselves are similarly susceptible. Both Republican and Democratic voters can follow their leaders, absorb partisan narratives, rationalize favored positions, and repeat arguments they have examined only superficially. The tendency appears on both sides of the partisan divide.

Political identity is also strongly influenced by family and social environment. Many people grow up surrounded by one political tradition and retain it into adulthood. Different circumstances might have produced a different affiliation. Kogelmann and Wheatley use this fact to weaken claims of moral superiority based simply on having joined the “right” party.

This observation does not make all political positions equally defensible. It places limits on the conclusions that can reasonably be drawn about an unknown individual.

The distinction is crucial. An idea can be criticized without assuming that every person associated with the idea possesses the same knowledge, motives, commitment, or character.

Harm and Responsibility

The second cognitive route concerns harm.

Political decisions have consequences. A voter can support politicians whose policies adversely affect other people. Kogelmann and Wheatley therefore consider whether resentment toward an opposing voter can be justified because that voter helped cause harm.

They use a relatively demanding conception of harm involving wrongful interference with interests or rights. Ordinary political disadvantage is insufficient. Democratic government constantly produces winners and losers, and almost every significant policy leaves somebody worse off in some respect.

The authors grant, for purposes of their argument, that an individual's vote can contribute causally to political harm. Even then, culpability remains uncertain.

A voter may not believe a candidate will carry out an extreme promise. The objectionable policy may be only one part of a much larger political program. The voter may actively oppose that particular policy while supporting the candidate for entirely different reasons. Legislative institutions, courts, other elected officials, and constitutional constraints may lead the voter to believe the proposal will never become law.

Other voters certainly may support a harmful policy deliberately and knowingly. Kogelmann and Wheatley accept that possibility. Their argument concerns the leap from knowing how an individual voted to knowing enough about that individual's motives to justify resentment.

Usually, the evidence is missing.

Their bumper-sticker example makes the point particularly well. Suppose government has adopted a policy that you believe violates your rights. You encounter a stranger displaying a bumper sticker for the party responsible. The sticker tells you something about political affiliation. It does not reveal why the person voted as she did, whether she supported the objectionable policy, whether she expected it to be enacted, or whether she was indifferent to its effects.

Generalized resentment therefore outruns the available evidence.

This is the principal reason affective polarization fails the test of cognitive rationality. Hostility is being directed toward individuals about whom too little is known to establish that the hostility is fitting. The authors consequently conclude that affective polarization is not cognitively rational.

Instrumentally Rational Emotions

The second theory is instrumental rationality.

An emotion can be useful even when it is not an accurate or proportionate response to circumstances. Anger may cause someone to defend himself more aggressively. Fear may induce caution. Pride may encourage persistence. An emotion can therefore contribute to accomplishing a goal.

Kogelmann and Wheatley illustrate this with a landowner whose reputation for anger makes a neighbor take precautions that protect his property. His anger has instrumental value because it changes the other person's behavior in a useful way.

Political anger can also motivate behavior. It can encourage people to protest, organize, donate money, endure inconvenience, and vote.

The authors take this possibility seriously. Political anger can provide solidarity, emotional release, and motivation. An activist confronting genuine injustice may gain enough motivation from anger to participate in costly political action that otherwise would never occur.

For ordinary voters, one possible benefit is increased participation. Research cited by the authors suggests that affectively polarized people are more likely to vote.

That benefit has to be weighed against its cost.

The Cost of Anger

Instrumental rationality includes efficiency. Reaching a desired end by an unnecessarily expensive route is less rational when another route reaches the same end at lower cost.

Affective polarization carries substantial personal costs.

The authors cite research indicating that anger can impair reasoning, influence judgments about risk, increase the tendency to interpret unpleasant events as intentional actions by other people, and increase reliance on stereotypes. Anger is also an unpleasant condition in itself.

Political participation does not require these costs.

People can vote because they consider voting a civic duty. They can vote to support a candidate rather than to punish an opponent. They can participate because they value having some part in the political process. They can support a policy without cultivating contempt for the people who oppose it.

Kogelmann and Wheatley's instrumental argument therefore becomes a comparison of means. Affective polarization may sometimes produce political participation, but other motivations can produce the same participation without requiring sustained anger and hostility. The authors consequently conclude that affective polarization is not instrumentally rational.

Why the Argument Is Convincing

The strength of the Kogelmann-Wheatley argument lies in its modest scope. Their analysis leaves ample room for political disagreement, moral judgment, and justified anger directed at known conduct. A person who knowingly harms another can still be held responsible, and a destructive policy can still be described as destructive. The questionable inference begins when political affiliation alone is treated as sufficient evidence for antagonistic emotions toward an unknown individual.

That distinction is easily lost in partisan politics.

In partisan reasoning, a policy position may be treated as evidence of ideology, the ideology as evidence of character, and party membership as proof that an individual accepts the ideology. The chain can end with a complete stranger being described as hateful, dangerous, evil, or less than fully human. Each step may add conclusions unsupported by the available facts.

The process also feeds on itself. Once members of the opposing party are perceived as bad people, evidence is interpreted through that assumption. Their actions appear more threatening, ambiguous statements receive hostile interpretations, and stereotypes substitute for information about individuals. The emotional response then seems to confirm the original judgment.

Kogelmann and Wheatley break that cycle by returning attention to evidence and rational justification.

The Reductionist TOV View

TOV reaches the same conclusion by a shorter route.

The reductionist approach separates observable conduct from the abstractions placed over it. Political labels such as Democrat, Republican, liberal, conservative, socialist, fascist, or extremist may convey some information, but none provides a complete description of an individual human being.

The word evil illustrates the problem especially well.

Applied to an unknown political opponent, “evil” tells us little about the conduct being condemned. A more useful description identifies the act itself: force, fraud, coercion, deception, cruelty, violence, deliberate injury, or some other observable behavior. Evidence can then be examined, responsibility assigned, and consequences evaluated.

“Evil” can easily bypass that process. The label supplies condemnation before the underlying behavior has been identified with precision.

“Behave like animals” reduces clarity even further. The expression contributes no useful description of political conduct. Its function is exclusion. The opposing group is pictured as something lower, alien, and fundamentally unlike one's own group. Individual differences disappear.

A reductionist treatment reverses the process. The political category is stripped away until attention returns to the individual and the conduct actually attributable to that individual. Party membership alone establishes very little about motive, knowledge, intention, or character. Judgment becomes stronger as the evidence becomes more specific.

Kogelmann and Wheatley arrive at this conclusion through the philosophy of rational emotion. Their cognitive test requires antagonistic feelings to fit the facts. Their instrumental test requires those feelings to accomplish useful ends without imposing unnecessary costs. Affective polarization generally satisfies neither requirement.

TOV therefore agrees with their central conclusion.

Political disagreement, opposition to a policy, and anger toward identifiable conduct can all be rational. Generalized hostility toward millions of strangers solely because they belong to an opposing political group is not rational.

From a reductionist perspective, judgment begins with the individual and the conduct attributable to that person. Political categories and moral labels add little unless the evidence supports the inference drawn from them.

Much of affective polarization disappears in the process.