When Polarization Protects Democracy: Psychologists Challenge the Field’s Core Assumption

Political polarization has become one of the most intensively studied phenomena in the behavioral and social sciences. A search for the term in the Web of Science database conducted in October 2025 returned more than 13,000 publications, over 60 percent of them published since 2020. Yet during the same decade that researchers have been measuring and attempting to reduce polarization, authoritarian and anti-democratic movements have gained strength across the world. Now two social psychologists argue that the field’s central assumption—that polarization is inherently harmful—may be not just wrong but actively dangerous in an age of extremism.

In an opinion article published in Frontiers in Social Psychology, Felipe Vilanova of the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul and the National Institute of Science and Technology on Social and Affective Neuroscience in Brazil, and Flavio Azevedo of Utrecht University, contend that polarization research has been treating all political conflict as presumptively pathological. Their argument draws on a stark empirical backdrop. In Germany, support for a dictatorship led by a strong leader has increased, and endorsement of social-Darwinist statements such as the claim that some lives are worthless more than doubled compared with previous years, according to the Mitte-Studie. The Leipzig Authoritarianism Study documented renewed increases in xenophobia, chauvinism, and the downplaying of Nazism, while national reports show extremist offenses rising year after year. Similar patterns appear in the United States and Brazil, where surveys reveal increased openness to military coups and one-party rule, and where extremists have attempted to overturn electoral outcomes by storming their respective congresses.

The authors argue that authoritarian, conservative, and reactionary networks have been among the principal drivers of rising distrust, conspiracism, and anti-scientific sentiment. These movements couple conspiratorial and anti-scientific narratives as a central element of their political strategy, a combination that has proven effective at undermining pluralist opponents, galvanizing followers, shifting blame away from authoritarian sources, and weakening democratic institutions. By portraying democracy and science as corrupt, elitist, or ideologically captured, these actors erode public trust in civic society and empirical inquiry. Crucially, they reframe their pursuit of political dominance as a project of renewal and social progress—a populist inversion in which the language of reform becomes a legitimizing frame for exclusionary and anti-democratic agendas. Opposition to democracy, science, and institutional expertise, the authors argue, is not an accidental feature of authoritarian populism but its defining component.

Against this backdrop, Vilanova and Azevedo introduce a conceptual distinction that challenges the field’s methodological conventions. Polarization research typically conceptualizes the phenomenon in one of two ways: ideologically, as increasing divergence or clustering of citizens’ attitudes along an ideological spectrum, or affectively, as intensified animosity toward political outgroups coupled with favoritism toward one’s own group. Both approaches are analytically tractable, but the authors describe them as conceptually naive and methodologically too coarse for the current political moment. The problem is that identical levels of measured polarization can reflect fundamentally different political realities.

Their framework distinguishes between agonistic democratic conflict and democratically corrosive conflict. Agonistic conflict is a constitutive feature of pluralist democracy, in which adversaries contest values and policies while accepting democratic norms, rules, and outcomes. Democratically corrosive conflict, by contrast, is a well-documented, elite-driven pathway to democratic backsliding, in which political identity is asymmetrically organized and strategically exploited to justify rule-breaking, delegitimize elections, and erode accountability. The distinction matters because much of the polarization literature treats all forms of conflict as analytically comparable, regardless of their implications for democratic functioning.

To make this distinction operational, the authors propose a heuristic framework organized around eight dimensions: core political orientation, relation to political opponents, electoral legitimacy, political violence and coercion, epistemic orientation, orientation to rights and inclusion, institutional infrastructure, and democratic function. Under agonistic conflict, opponents are treated as legitimate adversaries within a shared political community, elections are accepted with peaceful transfers of power, disagreement proceeds with some commitment to evidence and truth-seeking institutions, and accountability institutions such as independent courts, civil society, and a free press are materially sustained. Under corrosive conflict, opponents are cast as enemies, traitors, or contaminants; fraud claims are advanced without evidence; violence is normalized or strategically tolerated; disinformation and conspiracy narratives are deployed as strategy; and accountability institutions are defunded, captured, or selectively weaponized to entrench power.

The framework also insists that procedural compliance alone is insufficient. Elections can be formally lawful yet substantively distorted by gerrymandering, disenfranchisement, or unequal access. Similarly, formal rights may coexist with substantive exclusion: a democracy that protects formal liberties while permitting social and economic arrangements that systematically hollow out equal membership remains democratic only in a thin and unstable sense. The authors argue that conflicts over social and economic arrangements cannot be cleanly separated from conflicts over rights, recognition, and membership, because economic arrangements help determine who has security, health, mobility, voice, and genuine access to collective life. When such arrangements systematically expose some groups to deprivation or political marginalization while insulating dominant groups, they cease to be ordinary policy disagreements and become mechanisms through which hierarchy is organized and reproduced.

The normative stakes of this argument are considerable. The authors contend that when conflict is corrosive—reflecting domination, exclusion, or the strategic erosion of democratic norms—calls for empathy, reconciliation, or civility risk reproducing the very asymmetries they seek to resolve. Depolarization interventions that promote empathy and perspective-taking across ideological divides, without considering whether the underlying attitudes sustain or undermine the conditions for democratic discourse, may demobilize democratic publics at precisely the moment when active defense of evidence and reasoned inquiry is most needed. Urging those targeted by discrimination or authoritarian mobilization to empathize with their aggressors, the authors write, mirrors a familiar moral inversion: it relocates responsibility for harmony onto the vulnerable rather than the powerful. What appears as neutrality thereby becomes complicity in the depoliticization of injustice.

The argument extends to a critique of scientific neutrality itself. Vilanova and Azevedo argue that across parts of the behavioral and social sciences, phenomena tied to political elite strategy, propaganda infrastructures, and structural injustices are sometimes treated as normatively contaminated objects—too political or epistemically improper for direct analysis. They reject the view that neutrality is a methodologically virtuous goal, arguing instead that the cumulative effect of this depoliticization has been epistemically distorting and detrimental to the quality of science produced. When the political production of meanings, narratives, and identities is bracketed in the name of neutrality, social science risks rendering unintelligible the very forces that generate the attitudes it seeks to explain. Neutrality, in this view, can function as an analytic refusal to model inequities, power, and human suffering.

The authors are careful to note that their argument does not imply depolarization efforts are inherently misguided, nor that all polarization research treats conflict as uniformly undesirable. Polarization among democratic actors can, in some contexts, erode institutional trust, increase political violence, or impair collective problem-solving. Their claim is that normative evaluations of polarization must be conditioned on actors’ relationship to democratic rules and epistemic accountability—willingness to accept electoral losses, support for institutional checks, endorsement or rejection of political violence, and tolerance for misinformation as strategy. They propose that researchers shift from measuring attitudinal divergence toward analyzing how different audiences respond to consensus-promoting messages, tracing how appeals to unity and civility circulate through political discourse, and testing experimentally how harmony-oriented framings shape perceptions of legitimacy and dissent. This parallels scholarship on respectability politics, which shows how moralized expectations of composure are often imposed asymmetrically on marginalized groups, disciplining dissent while obscuring structures of domination. By treating consensus-seeking itself as an empirical object, the authors conclude, polarization research could clarify when conflict functions as a source of democratic resilience rather than erosion—and avoid equating democratic resistance with authoritarian delegitimization.

Subject of Research: A critique of polarization research arguing that political conflict must be evaluated by its relationship to democratic norms rather than its intensity.

Article Title: The problem with polarization research in an age of extremism

Article References: Vilanova, F., & Azevedo, F. (2026). The problem with polarization research in an age of extremism. Frontiers in Social Psychology, 4, Article 1779833. https://doi.org/10.3389/frsps.2026.1779833

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/frsps.2026.1779833

Keywords: political polarization, authoritarianism, democratic backsliding, affective polarization, social psychology, misinformation, populism, democratic theory, epistemic accountability, extremism, political psychology, civility