Branding at the Water’s Edge: Perceived Elite Polarization of Ukraine Aid, 2022–2024

How do political parties transform bipartisan foreign policy issues into partisan polarization? This study examines partisan polarization on Ukraine aid between Democratic and Republican elites as reflected in U.S. news media from March 2022 to December 2024, leveraging party brand theory and foreign policy polarization literature to explain when and how Democrats and Republicans consolidated distinct positions on a novel foreign policy issue. Analyzing 37,312 sentences from 23,630 news articles, we employ a dual-pipeline methodology combining LLM-based ideological scoring across four dimensions with BERT-based masked vocabulary extraction. Results reveal significant polarization growth, driven asymmetrically by Republican movement toward opposition while Democrats maintained stable pro-aid positioning. Resource allocation framing, such that Ukraine aid competes with domestic resources, contributed most strongly to the general polarization of supplying further aid to Ukraine, accounting for over 60% of explained variance. PELT identified October 2022 as the first major departure from bipartisan consensus, with polarization of the subsequent segments moving with electoral cycles and leadership transitions. Critically, as polarization increased, so did the clarity of party brands to voters: both parties’ messaging became more internally coherent, enabling clearer partisan differentiation. Vocabulary extraction revealed early crystallization of partisan linguistic patterns, with Democrats emphasizing language of provision (“promised,” “signed”) and Republicans emphasizing language of obstruction (“block,” “killed”). These findings demonstrate that elite polarization on Ukraine aid served functional party branding purposes, challenging assumptions about foreign policy’s insulation from domestic partisan conflict.