The threat posed by Covid-19 briefly brought unity and decreased polarisation. However, the increased sense of community might prove short-lived as certain political leaders sowed disagreement and the pandemic wreaked havoc on people’s lives and increased inequality.
Historically, threats such as ones during the Cold War have united domestic polities and reduced polarisation. When touring the country in the early 1960s in Travels with Charley: In Search of America, John Steinbeck describes how useful the Russians were as a common enemy: ‘[maybe] everybody needs Russians. I’ll bet even in Russia they need Russians. Maybe they call it Americans’. Similarly, Covid-19 gave countries around the world an opportunity on a golden platter to come together to save lives.
In March 2020, governments around the world locked themselves down to fight Covid-19. Everyone wanted to be protected against the pandemic, and there was an initial rally around the flag effect with high support for measures. As a society is in crisis, fighting the crisis becomes a priority over other policy initiatives. Political leaders uniting and speaking in one voice for a lockdown increased popular confidence and temporarily decreased other forms of polarisation.
In the USA, for instance, negative sentiment between both sides of the aisle dropped. Citizens reposed greater faith in their governments’ approach to the crisis -Trump even experienced a slight bump in approval ratings of five percent, as did governments such as those of Italy (+27%) or leaders such as Macron (+11%). Interestingly, as case numbers rise in counties, both Republicans and Democrats become worried about the pandemic and advocate for strict measures, demonstrating how usual opponents can unite to fight a common threat.
However, even in certain countries that locked down, some political leaders sought to use lies to strengthen their positions, and political parties objected to measures against the pandemic. As many of the measures are highly intrusive and highly important for personal safety, disagreement over them was intense, further leading to polarisation. In various countries such as Belgium, certain political parties, often conservative, objected to the measures of the government, and the consensus necessary to ensure broad compliance with strict measures broke down. This led many countries to relax measures during the summer of 2020. While there were calls for opening up the country as much as possible and not following the measures, the contrary opinions were equally visible. This discrepancy fueled polarisation, especially in countries with protests against lockdown such as Spain. A September 2020 survey by Pew Research Center found that 59% of Spaniards believed the country was more divided than before the pandemic. More recently, numerous protests erupted in France against the sanitary pass requiring vaccination, recovery or a negative test to enter restaurants and trains. In the other direction, Denmark and Canada kept a strong cross-party consensus, leading to 72 and 66 % of people thinking the country was more united than before the pandemic. In the USA, Democrats tended to push for stricter measures than Republicans, again leading to polarisation. A more recent survey found that while the total percentage trusting the government to do the right thing mostly or always has not changed since last year, the chasm between Democrats and Republicans has increased dramatically: going from 12 to 36% for the former, but dropping from 28 to 12% for the GOP. While this is probably linked to the transfer of power from Trump to Biden, the large gap highlights a continued and growing polarisation.
One could object by saying that a lack of cross party consensus and political polarisation only follows from politicians following their constituency and general polarisation in the population. In this sense, a lack of cross party consensus does not cause polarisation but is rather a mere symptom. But while political parties follow popular trends, they can often inflame them, setting fire to kindling. In fact, recent research by Pew Research Center finds that people who follow politics more closely show a greater partisan gap, so people listening to their favourite leaders are more likely to be extremely pro or against covid measures, depending on the line taken by their prefered politicians. This is in line with John Zaller’s (1992) ‘two-message model’ of how political leaders can influence opinion formation, thus fueling political polarisation by pushing for strong, opposing views.
In a similar though slightly different vein, certain political figures such as Erdogan have seen profit in lying to the public about the severity of Covid-19, thus fomenting polarisation. This phenomenon is a subset of the lack of cross party consensus, as lying about Covid often directly leads to disagreement, but a lack of consensus can happen without lies. As a political leader tells a lie to his followers, many of them are prone to believe it. An interesting study by Chaxel and Laporte found that after having presented people with a positive description of a hypothetical public person, they were more likely to judge that person’s (possibly false) claims as true. Similarly, a negative description led to more people believing a public person’s claims were false. This highlights the mechanism of how people can come to believe lies if they come from politicians they like, but also how they do not believe true facts coming from politicians they do not like. This leads to self-perpetuating polarisation as one only believes their side of the aisle, as observed in countries such as the USA, Britain, India or Poland, where polarisation seems to be strong.
Lies make discussions difficult as facts are questioned, and especially lies on sensitive topics such as wearing masks can fuel polarisation. Places in the USA where Trump won in 2016 were less likely to wear masks, even when imposed by local rules. What further emphasises the impact of public figures is that tweets in favor of masks spiked after Donald Trump was seen wearing one for the first time in public in July 2020. Similarly, many conspiracy theorists and far-right sympathisers joined large scale protests in countries such as the Netherlands, flouting social distancing rules.
Furthermore, leaders also use divisive language to inflame ethnic and racial tensions. They cannot conjure polarisation out of nothing, but they can help fuel it. In the 48 hours that followed after Trump described Covid-19 as the ‘Chinese Virus’, researchers measured a 656% increase in anti-Asian hate tweets. Trump helped to fuel hate crime against people of Asian descent; in a particularly sad case, a retired Thai immigrant in San Francisco died after being pushed to the floor.
These two mechanisms of lack of cross party consensus and leader rhetoric driving polarisation are not as present in every country, luckily. What should worry us, though, is the post-covid impact on polarisation. The pandemic has had and will have consequences ranging from unemployment, greater mortality rates to increasing economic inequality. Minorities have also been disproportionately affected, both in terms of death rates and being a larger share of essential workers in sectors such as food delivery or supermarkets. Furthermore, as a country does not face a single enemy anymore uniting them, polarisation might naturally increase, just as it did in the USA after the end of the Cold War.
The relationship between inequality and polarisation is not clear-cut. However, there are two mechanisms found by Gunderson. First, when economic issues are very relevant, income inequality has been found to drive polarisation. Second, when parties are sorted by income, meaning for example that mostly lower middle class people vote for a certain party, while upper class people vote for another party, income inequality is also a pushing factor behind polarisation. While economic issues will become even more relevant and push polarisation after we stop focusing on Covid-19, the extent to which parties are sorted by income will affect the impact on polarisation in each country. Though there have been plans to alleviate inequality and revive the economy, such as the €1.8 trillion Recovery plan for Europe, they are not enough to bring back inequality down to previous levels.
Moreover, this article initially focused on countries that locked down to fight the virus and acted to curb the impact of the pandemic. However, many countries downplayed the impact of the virus, locking down late or opening up prematurely, leading to large outbreaks in Brazil, India or Turkey with uneven access to healthcare. After such failures, citizens might decrease their trust in the government. Furthermore, the pandemic might hurt the fabric of society as people shield themselves from others, and suspicion grows. After the 1918 Spanish flu, some negative trends related to polarisation continued in areas which did not have strong public health leadership to address the disease properly. In the words of a survivor, John Delano of New Haven, Connecticut, ‘people didn’t seem as friendly as before. They didn’t visit each other, bring food over, have parties all the time. The neighborhood changed. People changed. Everything changed’.
These trends of possibly increasing polarisation are troublesome because of the negative impact of polarisation; it leads to a gridlock in politics, preventing much-needed changes to alleviate issues such as inequality or climate change. In the USA, polarisation has led to government shutdowns and less legislation being passed: from January 2013 to June 2014, Congress passed 89 substantial laws, around half of what they passed a decade earlier. Similarly, the European Commission faced difficulties when deciding on the size of its post-covid Recovery plan and how to allocate it. Additionally, in decaying democracies such as Turkey or Hungary, polarisation can prevent opposition parties from forming a common front against the ruling party.
Not all hope is lost, though, as democracies can fight polarisation in at least three ways, other than simply decreasing inequality with redistribution policies. First, political leaders themselves can choose to go above partisan divides and decrease polarisation. Opposition parties in Istanbul came together and won the mayoral elections by a landslide. Second, fundamental political changes can help to curtail polarisation. Maine made their voting system ranked-choice in 2016, which favors moderate candidates and limits bashing of the other party. Finally, as social media has played a key role in raising tensions and increasing polarisation, democracies should seriously reexamine how to change the algorithms that push people towards extremism and disagreement. The easy solution seems to be to break up Facebook. In the early 20th century, John Rockefeller’s Standard Oil controlled nearly the entirety of the U.S. oil market and acted as a monopoly: cutting deals with railroads, controlling pipelines and price-cutting competitors out of business. In response, the Supreme Court broke it apart into various companies in a landmark 1911 decision, which then helped to recreate a healthier market. However, simply breaking up Facebook like Standard Oil will not do the trick, for the problem is with the algorithm and the business model; 10 small Facebooks will lead to just as much polarisation. There are countless ideas on the topic which need to be developed further, such as community forums checking for identity, grassroots movements creating algorithms and small platforms, or letting people choose which type of algorithms they want, for example an algorithm that chooses reputable, fact-checked news sites.
Democracies need to wake up from the slumber and act now to ensure that polarisation doesn’t corrode their political systems and leave them powerless; climate change and economic inequality demand immediate action.