Varieties of Dislike. Using in-depth interviews to identify underlying dimensions of like-dislike scale responses in research on affective polarisation

Affective polarisation has become a topic of great concern in liberal democracies across the world. Research looking at the potential causes and consequences of growing political animosity is advancing rapidly, increasingly also focusing on multi-party systems and thus moving beyond the concept’s original context of the United States. However, one of the core components of affective polarisation – dislike – remains fundamentally ambiguous and in need of further conceptual and empirical clarification. This paper presents an empirical study that uses in-depth qualitative interviews to shed light on the different negative evaluations, emotions and associations that individuals have when answering the standard dislike-based feeling thermometer questions that are frequently used to measure affective polarisation. Using narrative as well as cognitive interviewing technique, it illustrates different criteria for evaluation, different reference points for inferring group characteristics, the importance of ambivalence in translating an evaluation into a single score and potential inconsistencies in what different scores reflect. The paper concludes by highlighting conceptual implications of those findings as well as practical implications for quantitative survey research on affective polarisation.