What we measure
Affective Polarization
Affective polarization is the gap between how warmly people regard their own party and how coldly they regard the other one. It is a measure of feeling, not of policy. Two people can hold nearly identical positions on taxes or immigration and still describe each other as untrustworthy, selfish, or a threat — and it is that second gap, not the first, that has widened most over the past forty years. [PLACEHOLDER — rewrite in your own framing.]
Iyengar, Sood and Lelkes argued that this hostility is better explained by social identity than by ideological disagreement: partisanship functions like a group attachment, and out-party dislike grows even where issue positions do not move apart. Iyengar and Westwood then showed the effect reaches beyond politics, appearing in tasks where party was irrelevant to the decision at hand. [PLACEHOLDER — your gloss on what this means for Arizona.]
The standard instrument is the feeling thermometer: respondents rate each party from 0 (cold) to 100 (warm), and the difference between in-party and out-party ratings is the polarization score. The figures below apply that measure to Arizona. [PLACEHOLDER — note your survey waves and n.]
Iyengar, S., Sood, G., & Lelkes, Y. (2012). Affect, not ideology: A social identity perspective on polarization. Public Opinion Quarterly, 76(3), 405–431.
Iyengar, S., & Westwood, S. J. (2015). Fear and loathing across party lines: New evidence on group polarization. American Journal of Political Science, 59(3), 690–707.
Iyengar, S., Lelkes, Y., Levendusky, M., Malhotra, N., & Westwood, S. J. (2019). The origins and consequences of affective polarization in the United States. Annual Review of Political Science, 22, 129–146.