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Cultural Divides and Affective Polarisation

Project Coordinator and Principal Researcher: Dr Roula Nezi

Duration: September 2021 - August 2022

Overview

The project aims to situate developments in Greek public opinion in a comparative perspective, and examine how cultural issue cleavages have realigned around new partisan identities. In doing so, the goal is to examine the extent to which social polarisation on issues that measure the logic of a “culture war” narrative prevail over those that measure “economic” issues and interests. The researchers propose that one way to evaluate the extent of political and societal polarisation, and its effects, is by examining how individuals identify themselves on a dimension from “liberalism” to “conservatism”, and will then explore how this continuum relates to group identities and polarisation over time. After having established evidence for polarisation between liberal and conservative identities, they will ask what factors are responsible for producing and sustaining these changes, and finally, how they manifest in contemporary partisan identities.


Project Outputs

Policy Brief & Research Paper

- The Policy Brief is available here.

- Read the Research Paper of the project, which was published as part of the GreeSE working paper series, GreeSE Paper No.190


 

Events

- The preliminary findings of the Research Project were presented on 22 March 2023 at a joint Research Seminar along with Professors Sokratis Koniordos' and Dimitri A. Sotiropoulos' Project on ‘The Paradoxes and Mixed Record of Culture Wars in Contemporary Greece’.
Read more here.
Listen to the podcast here.


 

Research Team

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Project Coordinator and Principal Researcher: Roula Nezi, Department of Politics, University of Surrey

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Co-Researcher: George Karyotis, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow