Prof. Alex Theodoridis' paper "Party Animals? Extreme Partisan Polarization and Dehumanization" has just been published in Political Behavior. Congratulations to Prof. Theodoridis and his coauthors! Check out the blogpost version of the article for a quick summary of the findings.
The paper studies whether contemporary polarization of the US electorate contributes to a willingness by voters to apply dehumanizing metaphors to members of political parties other than their own ("out-partisans"). Using three large, broadly representative, online surveys, the authors show that most partisans do in fact engage in dehumanization of out-partisans. Among other findings, the authors show that dehumanization is most closely related to extreme affective polarization, and that dehumanization is associated with biased partisan-motivated reasoning.
