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Beyond Single-Shot Designs: Repeated Treatments, Affective Polarization, and Democratic Norms

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2026

Libby Jenke*
Affiliation:
Political Science, University of Houston , USA
*
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Abstract

Although theory and observational work suggest that affective polarization should shape citizens’ support for democratic norms, experimental tests of this causal claim largely find null effects. Most studies assume any impact would be immediate and rely on one-shot manipulations. Yet democratic norms are sticky; brief shifts in partisan feelings may be too weak or fleeting to move them. I therefore test whether repeated treatments over several waves of a survey shift affective polarization and, in turn, support for democratic norms. I find no significant first-stage effects: the treatments do not change respondents’ affective polarization, so repeated exposures do not cumulatively move it and downstream effects on norms cannot be identified. I conclude by considering why my findings differ from studies that report significant effects for similar treatments. Many experiments measure affective polarization as hostility toward the outparty, whereas this study and observational work conceptualize it as the gap between inparty and outparty evaluations.

Information

Type
Preregistered Report
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2026. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of American Political Science Association
Figure 0

Table 1. Between-subjects experimental design: treatment groups in the treatment and the control conditions in each waveTable 1 long description.

Figure 1

Table 2. Treatments and descriptionsTable 2 long description.

Figure 2

Figure 1. No evidence of accumulated effects (H1 unconfirmed). Estimates are differences in differences: differences between the treatment and control groups’ differences in affective polarization between the two waves. FT stands for feeling thermometer. N = 1563 (Waves 1 and 2) and N = 1345 (Waves 2 and 3). Affective polarization measures are standardized to have mean 0 and SD 1.

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