Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/296586 
Year of Publication: 
2024
Series/Report no.: 
WWZ Working Paper No. 2024/04
Publisher: 
University of Basel, Center of Business and Economics (WWZ), Basel
Abstract: 
There is a concern that citizens with different political positions and party affiliations increasingly dislike each other. We examine this affective polarization (AP), which is often associated with a weakening of democracy, in the context of Switzerland's multiparty landscape with proportional governmental representation. Evaluating the long-term development of AP in Switzerland with both historical and newly gathered data for 2023, we find hardly any considerable change in AP over the last three decades, except for a substantial jump between 1999 and 2003 and a generally lower level of party sympathy in 2023. Complementary, our analysis of split-ticket voting behavior in national parliamentary elections with continuous data back to 1983 does not support any trend in partisan polarization from a voters' revealed preference perspective. We further find that more affectively polarized individuals report, on average, lower satisfaction with democracy but show a higher willingness to participate in politics across a wide range of different forms of political engagement, even when controlling for individuals' general sympathy towards political parties.
Subjects: 
affective polarization
political participation
political discussion
latent candidacy
splitticket voting
JEL: 
D72
D91
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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