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By Rachael O'Connor
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A political experiment conducted across nine separate democratic countries did not work in the United States.
Political polarization—the growing divide between political groups, in which individuals increasingly align with extreme positions rather than centrist viewpoints—has become more pronounced in recent years as political parties move further apart ideologically.
It is a growing trend around the world, promoting divisive narratives and potentially threatening civil discourse and social cohesion, according to EBSCO.
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Now, researchers from the University of Bergen have looked at the effects of polarization, including affective polarization: that society is not only politically divided, but opponents also dislike one another.
Lars Erik Berntzen, associate professor and political scientist at the University of Bergen, and his colleagues wanted to test whether affective polarization "leads to a range of negative consequences, such as intolerance and reduced support for democratic rules of the game."
In doing so, they conducted a study across nine democratic countries (Brazil, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States), studying whether it was possible to lower the polarization score through a survey. And while it worked in many countries, it had the weakest effects in the US and Italy.
*"*There have been many studies of affective polarization in the U.S., and for good reason. It is now well documented that animosity toward the other side has risen sharply," Berntzen told Newsweek.
"But later U.S. studies found little evidence that this kind of polarization drives anti-democratic attitudes, one of the big scares. That could be read as a partial exoneration. Perhaps the scientific field had been barking up the wrong tree?"
He and his team expanded the scope of these studies to include "a broad range of democracies and found a rather different picture."
"Our experimental intervention successfully reduced affective polarization, letting us test whether this shift also affected democratic attitudes. In several countries, people did in fact become more willing to compromise and uphold their opponents’ democratic rights. But again, not in the U.S.," he said.
The U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., is divided into red and blue, a concept of political polarization.
Respondents across all nine countries were asked to rate their feelings toward different political parties and their supporters on a scale from zero to 100, with the difference between their preferred party and the party they liked the least becoming their polarization score.
"If, for example, I give my party 90 and the opposing party 10, I get a polarization score of 80," Berntzen said in a press release via Alpha Galileo.
After summarizing the findings, researchers conducted a new survey experiment to determine whether affective polarization negatively affects democratic attitudes.
One third of participants were told that research shows people across political divides have a lot in common, and were asked to identify at least three such similarities, at which point researchers found that it "made people less negatively inclined toward their political opponents."
In most cases, there was a downward shift of between three and 10 points on the polarization scale, which Berntzen described in the release as "significant" because it is "as much as polarization has increased in the United States over recent decades."
However, in the U.S. itself, the depolarization experiment had no effect—which is consistent with previous, similar studies on affective polarization.
Berntzen told Newsweek: "One implication is that partisan animosity in the U.S. may simply be too far gone, too entrenched for the kinds of interventions our field has relied on to shift it easily. That makes it harder to establish these relationships in the U.S.
"But this does not imply that affective polarization does not matter. In fact, it may suggest the opposite. It also means that the U.S. may be a poor case for judging what affective polarization does in other democracies."
Much of the previous research into this phenomenon was focused on the United States rather than other parts of the world, with Berntzen saying in a release the U.S. had been "used as a kind of standard model," which can be "misleading."
Their research also suggested that polarization is indeed dangerous, as when polarization decreased, people were less willing to discriminate against political opponents, and the willingness to engage in political compromise grew.
Berntzen said it was "clear" that "polarization "leads to greater political intolerance and weaker support for democratic norms."
Their research, he said, established that "polarization indeed contributes to these attitudes, and we can conclude that too much polarization is dangerous."
Correction, 06/25/2026, 11:40 a.m. ET: This article has been updated to clarify that the United States was not the only country where the study did not have a depolarization effect.
Reference
Harteveld E, Berntzen LE, Kokkonen A, Kelsall H, Linde J, Dahlberg S. The (alleged) consequences of affective polarization: A survey experiment in nine democracies. European Journal of Political Research. Published online 2026:1–19. doi:10.1017/S1475676526101273
Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Kara Dolman, Emma Lee-Sang and Gray R. Thomas.
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