We have fewer than 70 days until Election Day this November, and you can expect the political campaign ads to begin picking up. The term polarization has been used to describe politics for decades. Petter Törnberg is an assistant professor of social science at the University of Amsterdam, and he argues that the concept is outdated and inaccurately describes where politics are today. He says it's key to think about the three things it takes to have polarization: symmetry, divergence in opinion and mutual repulsion.
Törnberg: So those are the three meanings and three understandings that come with this. Of course, those we have over time, as we've studied polarization, come to add more and more disclaimers or additional words to modify the meaning, as we've realized that these three descriptors actually poorly describe what is going on.
Moore: Why do you say they poorly describe it?
Törnberg: So what basically, first, the question is: is it symmetric? Well, when we look empirically at the data across countries, we rarely see this type of symmetry. It's often one political side that is undergoing transformation more visibly, and the other side simply is not. And so this idea of symmetry, it's just purely empirically matches the material that we have. And so people have started referring to it as asymmetric polarization.
Moore: You point out in your writing here that political polarization in the U.S. is not necessarily even been a constant. And when we look back at the Cold War, for example, there was a concern that the two major parties were too weakly polarized, meaning that there wasn't a significant difference between the two of them.
Törnberg: Yeah, exactly. I would say like conflict and disagreement and even anger, being upset, having this conflict, it's not necessarily something that's bad. I mean, democracy needs differences in opinions. Otherwise we don't really, voters don't really have a choice. So we do want some level of disagreement. So polarization isn't inherently bad.
But I would rather say, and this is also linked to what we've been seeing, is that it's not necessary, because the other definition that exists between polarization, the other parts of it, is this notion of a divergence in space. And so it comes with this idea that there's a difference in disagreement that is growing. So the parties are becoming more and more different from each other to such an extent that it becomes dysfunctional.
But it is quite questionable whether that second element, whether that also describes what is taking place, because, I mean, this has been a big debate in the field, but it's not that clear that the differences in opinion are growing over time.
And then the final thing is this mutual repulsion that I mentioned, that these two sides are pushing each other apart. And that too is not necessarily what we're seeing when we're looking across countries. So we have right-wing, far-right parties coming into power or growing in popularity across the world. And if this mutual repulsion idea was true, then what we would expect would be that the left goes the opposite direction, right? And that's not actually what we're seeing. What we're seeing is in most cases, the left and mainstream parties are adopting right-wing positions. And following that article. Right.
And so it's more of an accommodation. And so that's in part why the concept of polarization seems to fit rather poorly, because it has these three implications: that it's symmetric, that it's a divergence in opinion space and that there's a mutual repulsion. But none of them actually seems to be going on. None of them seem to be playing out if we're looking at the empirical data.
And the response from political science and from social scientists has been to try to, well, this is about affective polarization. We might not see a growing difference in opinions, and growing difference in opinion might not actually be that bad because disagreement is important for democracy. But what we're actually seeing is affective polarization or sectarian polarization, which is this idea that the voters of the two parties start hating each other more and more.
Moore: But there is some sense that, in my reading, we have this word. It comes with a specific understanding that borrowed from physics, but then every single thing that it means is just not what the record shows.
Törnberg: It's not what the empirical data shows. And so we end up with this concept that we having to define it and add all of these additions that change the meaning of it in such a way that it just doesn't mean anything anymore.
Moore: You write that by the 2000s, the concept of polarization was no longer strictly something that was discussed in academia, but it was moving into media coverage as well. What impact did that have on us moving away from just this scholarly idea of it to this more mainstream media, a larger proliferation of the use of the term?
Törnberg: So I think that you can understand why it's an attractive term. And I think both for academics and for journalists, it is comfortable because it gives you this neutral position. It's like, well, there's these two sides and they're fighting, and you don't have to take a position, because describing things as they are sometimes seems like taking a position. And that can be a risky move if you're dependent on funding that can be in part controlled by political factors, or if you're a journalist.
And so this neutralizing language, it comes to shape both the research findings and how we study, and also how the public understand what is taking place, in a way that I think can be quite dangerous, because it means that we're not recognizing what is actually taking place, which is that one of the sides of the political spectrum is transforming in ways that is becoming increasingly threatening to democracy.
Moore: The title of your scholarly article here is "It's Not Polarization; It's the Radicalization of the Political Right." Why use the term radicalization?
Törnberg: So coming back to these questions of what polarization means and the ways that it poorly matches the empirical data, if we look at the term radicalization, it actually just inherently captures a lot of these transformations that we're seeing. So it is something that is taking place on one side of the political spectrum. It's not a universal tendency. So that's something that's contained in radicalization. It is a shift towards more illiberal and anti-democratic ideals. And it is also this more and more acceptance for political violence, which we are also seeing on parts of the political right.
Whereas polarization is not describing this. Radicalization does capture those changes. And so, for instance, the sense of a shifting identity to politics that terms like affective polarization or sectarian polarization have highlighted, those terms are very inherently captures by the notion of radicalization.
And so, basically, we are looking at the concept of polarization that we've had to modify. We've had to add caveats to it until it's basically lost all its initial meaning, and it's basically used to describe something that is the exact opposite of it. And then we have the term radicalization, which out of the box is describing the phenomenon that we're seeing.
And I think this is also, of course, in the context of social science, of political science, where it's easy in the public debate, one side is calling the other side extreme and saying that they're being polarized, and it can be difficult to take a stance. It seems like it's just the same thing. There are two sides yelling at each other and it just seems like, oh, can we stop yelling? But for social sciences, these words actually have specific meanings. They're linked to specific metrics. We have definitions for them. And if those definitions are fulfilled, we should use those words.
Moore: Yeah, I think that's a really fascinating element to this, because when we think about political advertisements that we see here in the U.S., the use of radical, regardless of what the noun is following that, it's seen as an attack. Do you view radical or radicalization as a pejorative?
Törnberg: So for social scientists, we take a step back and we think it's a neutral position. But at the same time, these terms have meanings. And of course, it depends on your relationship, your view on democracy and on liberalism and pluralism. If you think that those are things to be pursued, if you think this, you might be against those things. And then radicalization and radicalism is not inherently a bad thing, right?
And so I think that's the question, but those are the meanings of the terms. And they are, to a certain degree, technical terms that are useful. And that also comes with a prescription that shape the type of research we do and what we may see as solutions to the problems that we observe.
Moore: One of the elements you talk about here is this sort of intraparty escalation. We're seeing infighting within a party here. We're seeing it within elements of the Republican Party here in the state of Arkansas. But we're seeing also across the U.S. in Democratic primaries, we're seeing this sort of move between more progressive candidates and more central candidates. Again, this is perhaps maybe archaic terms to use in 2026, but it's a way that we talk about it here in the media. This intraparty escalation, how do you see this playing out when you think about the radicalization of politics?
Törnberg: Yeah, I think what we can see is that it develops as a result of growing polarization, like growing anger in the electorate. There becomes a feedback loop between voters and between the party, in a way such that party elites try to trigger what we can call polarization, so anger against the party and their voters, as a strategy in order to draw voters, and that it becomes feedback processes inside of the parties that leads to this radicalization.
So I think these are very much systemic processes, and they're very much often the result of certain ways that the party and the electoral system have been organized. So shifts in like in the U.S., with a certain degree parties becoming weaker relative to the electorate, with, for instance, the introduction of primaries, is very much part of these dynamics, which creates this centrifugal force and incentivizes this type of radicalizing politics.
Moore: What can the average voter or citizen utilize from this framework to help inform their decisions when they go to the polls this November?
Törnberg: I think it can be a bit of a question of trying to see beyond the yelling between two equal parts, to actually look at what are their impacts and what are their relationships. Like if you see when they govern, is it actually extreme or are they actually anti-democratic? Because it's easy that we end up in that it's just competing discourses and people yelling at each other. But there is actually policies and things taking place underneath that.
And I think that for researchers, of course, we access that through empirical data and through studies. But I think voters also can come closer to see what policies and what is the relationship to democracy that these parties are pursuing.
And this is not, I don't think it's just a left-wing position or a Democratic position, because I think that this is very much in the interest of Republican and conservative and right-wing voters, because what we're seeing is that the dividing line between left and right in many countries is coming to run between democratic and anti-democratic politics. And I think that that is just as concerning for conservative and right-leaning voters as it is for left-leaning and capital-D Democratic voters, because I think we are all interested in preserving democracy.
Petter Törnberg is an assistant professor of computational social science at the University of Amsterdam. You can find a link to his article, "It's Not Polarization; It's the Radicalization of the Political Right," here.
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