Party Attitudes

Affective Polarization

Political scientists have long studied how polarization shapes voter attitudes and behavior.³ Affective polarization is one such consequence: the extent to which we like our own political party and dislike the opposition. It is a measure of emotion, 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 liking–disliking gap, more than the policy motivated gap, that has widened over the past forty years.¹

In their seminal piece, Iyengar, Sood and Lelkes suggest that while the positive orientation toward one’s own party has stayed relatively constant over time, disliking the opposing party has increased. What is more, this hostility is better explained by social identity than by issue-based ideological disagreement. Partisanship functions like a group attachment — an identity.¹

The standard instrument to measure affective polarization is the feeling thermometer: respondents rate the political parties, along with other groups, from 0 (cold) to 100 (warm), and the difference between in-party and out-party ratings is the polarization score.¹ The figures below display affective polarization, utilizing the American National Election Studies (ANES) cumulative dataset.

1. Iyengar, S., Sood, G., & Lelkes, Y. (2012). Affect, not ideology: A social identity perspective on polarization. Public Opinion Quarterly, 76(3), 405–431.
2. 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.
3. 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.

Reading the figures

The first chart tracks how warmly partisans rate their own party and how warmly they rate the other one, 1978–2024; the distance between the lines is the affective polarization score. Only one line moves. In-party warmth sits almost exactly where it stood forty-six years ago (70.7 to 70.1), while out-party warmth fell from 48.0 to 20.6 — the gap roughly doubled not because people came to like their own side more, but because they came to dislike the other side far more.

The second chart separates the parties as institutions (“The Democratic Party”) from the people who make them up (“Democrats”) and from ideological labels (“Liberals,” “Conservatives”), and lets you choose who is doing the rating — everyone, Democratic or Republican identifiers, or pure independents (those who do not lean toward either party).

These are national figures, not just Arizona.

The Arizona Voter Survey

Affective Polarization in Arizona

To what extent do these trends apply to Arizona? The AVP survey is a a two-wave panel survey of Arizona adults fielded by YouGov: 1,000 respondents in December 2022 and 803 in May 2024, of whom 403 were recontacted from the first wave. The survey wave selector at the top drives every figure below it — switch waves and the bars, thermometers and radar plots all follow.

Each figure splits respondents four ways: overall, and by those who identify as Democrats, Republicans, or independents. That split is where most of the interest lies. Pooling both waves, the affective polarization score is 56.2 overall (n = 1,784), but 62.5 among Democratic identifiers, 56.3 among Republicans, and only 35.7 among independents (n = 236). The average conceals a large gap between people who identify with a party to those who don’t.