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There are increasing concerns about high affective polarization and low political trust in many democracies. While most work connecting the two focuses on elite behaviour, or the individual level relationship between polarization and distrust, the relationship between (perceived) societal polarization and political distrust is less clear. I argue that the perceived affective polarization of society contributes to the widespread political distrust that we see in many democracies. In this talk, I’ll briefly discuss a motivating observational analysis which suggests that societal affective polarization contributes to distrust, especially among the less polarized. I’ll then propose a survey experiment to test whether this relationship may be causal in origin.
