The distance between us: the role of ideological proximity in shaping perceptions of inter-partisan relationships
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Escalating hostility between partisans threatens democratic governance and social cohesion by eroding trust and fuelling discriminatory behaviour towards opposing groups. This study investigates how people perceive the relations between different partisan groups and why certain pairs of partisans are viewed as friendlier or more hostile towards one another. Drawing on similarity-attraction theory in social psychology and research on affective polarization, I argue that citizens perceive the relationship as more friendly between individuals who support ideologically similar parties. The claim is empirically supported through the use of a novel survey item that assesses the likelihood of two partisans becoming good friends, across three multi-party democracies: Canada, Germany, and the UK. The findings suggest that the ideological proximity of parties not only shapes citizens’ perceptions of parties themselves but also influences their views of fellow citizens across party lines. By demonstrating that people consider party proximity and ideological alignment when evaluating inter-partisan relations, the study sheds light on how ideological and affective dimensions intertwine within these relationships in multi-party democracies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".