Why Political Polarization Is Increasing Every Year?

Political polarization is tearing at the seams of democracies around the world, from Brazil and India to Poland and Turkey. It isn’t just an American illness but a global phenomenon reshaping political landscapes everywhere. Affective polarization is at a historic high on a global average basis suggesting that people are increasingly likely to perceive supporters of opposing political parties as hostile. Countries enduring violent political conflicts tend to be the most polarized, but on average, affective polarization is rising fastest in democracies like the US, Germany, India, Brazil and Bulgaria.

By several measures, Americans are growing more divided with studies showing the U.S. is polarizing faster than other democracies while members of Congress are farther apart ideologically than they’ve been in fifty years. One survey suggested many Americans would like to split the country literally, agreeing that states should secede from the union. Turkey represents a particularly jarring example where almost eight out of ten people there would not want their daughter to marry someone who votes for the party they most dislike, and nearly three-quarters would not even want to do business with such a person.

This intensifying division represents more than political disagreement. Severe polarization makes democracy vulnerable as opposing sides come to be seen as enemies needing to be vanquished rather than political adversaries to compete against and at times negotiate with. Understanding why polarization is increasing every year matters because the consequences extend from personal relationships to democratic stability itself, affecting everything from policy making to violence in streets. Let’s examine the specific forces driving this global surge in political division.

Political Leaders Deliberately Inflame Divisions

Particularly striking is just how decisive polarizing leaders often are. Figures like Narendra Modi in India, Jarosław Kaczyński in Poland, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey have relentlessly inflamed basic divisions and entrenched them throughout society, often with resounding electoral success. They’ve aggravated tensions not only by demonizing opponents and curtailing democratic processes but also by pushing for radical changes like a total ban on abortion in Poland.

Politicians choose divisive issues to highlight in order to pursue their own political agenda, exploiting real grievances of voters. These politicians might exploit real grievances and anxieties about unemployment or crime, or they may even manufacture threats such as Donald Trump calling Central American refugees an invading army. The strategic use of division as political tool creates electoral advantages by mobilizing supporters through shared antagonism toward the other side rather than through positive policy vision.

In most countries, polarization is caused by dramatic change in the country’s political life. For example, the idea of a Hindu Rashtra has been on the rise since the election of Narendra Modi in 2014 with the winning party’s association with right-wing extremists exacerbating long-existing divides. Gandhi and Nehru were of the opinion that the Indian nation would be a secular state where all people regardless of their caste, religion, gender would coexist in harmony, but Hindu nationalists strive to establish the dominance of the majority.

The incentive structure of modern politics rewards polarizing behavior. In primary systems, candidates appeal to partisan bases rather than median voters, selecting for more extreme positions. In general elections, mobilizing your base through fear and anger about the other side proves more effective than appealing to persuadable middle. Politicians learn that moderation and compromise are punished while performative outrage and tribal loyalty are rewarded, creating selection pressure toward increasingly polarizing leadership.

Economic Anxiety Fuels Political Anger

Economic anxieties are giving rise to unprecedented levels of polarization worldwide, especially in advanced economies with sluggish growth such as Spain and Japan. Economic optimism has cratered thanks to rising inflation in the wake of the pandemic. In countries traditionally viewed as stable democracies such as U.S. and Argentina, economic anxiety and distrust is fueling increased polarization.

After reviewing over a century’s worth of data from more than two hundred countries, Willis found that in democracies, surges in polarization tended to follow economic crises or corruption scandals which appeared to discredit traditional political leaders. These surges were often accompanied by the growth of populist political movements and an increased frequency of political violence events. The pattern reveals that economic insecurity creates political vulnerability where citizens angry about declining prospects become receptive to polarizing messages blaming the other side.

Six countries, namely the U.S., South Africa, Argentina, Spain, Colombia and Sweden, are classified as severely polarized while Brazil, Mexico, the U.K., Kenya, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands are at risk of severe polarization. Important to note is that emerging nations with slow growth such as Argentina, South Africa, and Mexico are witnessing significant trust deficits between businesses and governments, while rapidly growing economies like Saudi Arabia, China and India are experiencing least pronounced trust gaps.

Economic stagnation creates zero-sum thinking where any group’s gain must come at another group’s expense. This makes politics tribal struggle for scarce resources rather than collaborative effort to expand prosperity for everyone. When the pie isn’t growing, fights over dividing it become vicious with each side viewing the other as existential threat to their economic security. The scarcity mentality bred by prolonged economic difficulties transforms political differences into life-or-death conflicts.

Media Fragmentation Creates Separate Realities

The changing media landscape plays a role in polarization with the rise of partisan cable news channels, the decline of local newspapers, and the proliferation of online misinformation. With legitimate news outlets putting content behind paywalls to raise revenue, many Americans turn to less credible sources such as social media and YouTube videos. This fragmentation means different groups consume completely different information diets producing incompatible understandings of reality.

Rising use of digital platforms and growing volume of AI-generated content are making divisive misinformation and disinformation more ubiquitous. Algorithmic bias could become more common due to political and societal polarization and associated misinformation and disinformation. The algorithms optimizing for engagement promote outrage and conflict because those emotions drive clicks and shares. Content reinforcing existing beliefs and demonizing the other side performs better than nuanced information encouraging understanding across divides.

Social media platforms create echo chambers where people are exposed only to perspectives confirming their existing views while opposing perspectives get filtered out. The personalization algorithms determining what content you see learn your political leanings and show you more content aligned with those views. Over time, your information environment becomes increasingly one-sided making opposing perspectives seem not just wrong but incomprehensible or insane because you’ve lost exposure to the reasoning behind them.

The decline of shared information sources means no common factual baseline exists from which to have disagreements. When different groups literally live in different information realities where basic facts about events are disputed, productive political discourse becomes impossible. You can’t compromise or find middle ground when you can’t even agree on what happened or what the actual situation is. The fragmentation of information environment transforms political disagreements into conflicts between alternate realities.

Cultural Conflicts Prove Harder to Resolve

In the U.S., cultural debates such as over immigration, LGBTQ rights and abortion have particularly fueled cross-party anger. Out of the twenty countries in the analysis, the U.S. showed the highest increase in polarization over these kinds of cultural debates across the twenty-year period. Economic debates are over who gets what and you can compromise over who gets what, but cultural debates are over who we are and it’s hard to compromise over who we are.

These identity-based conflicts resist the compromises that economic disputes allow. When politics centers on questions of fundamental values, national identity, religious beliefs, or cultural norms, positions become non-negotiable articles of faith rather than practical policy questions admitting compromise. You can split the difference on tax rates or spending levels, but you cannot compromise on whether abortion should be legal or illegal, whether immigration should increase or decrease, or what counts as legitimate American identity.

The shift from primarily economic to primarily cultural political conflict explains much of the intensification of polarization. Economic disputes could be managed through democratic bargaining and compromise with all sides getting some of what they wanted. Cultural conflicts structured as zero-sum battles over values and identity don’t permit such solutions. Either your side wins and imposes its vision or the other side wins and imposes theirs. This all-or-nothing framing makes every election existential struggle rather than routine democratic competition.

The clash arises from different conceptions of nationalism where one party claims nationality should be based on place of birth while another argues it’s entwined with religion. These tensions continue to drive polarization in modern times due to ruling party’s associations with nationalist movements. The conflicts over who belongs, what the nation represents, and what values should guide society create irresolvable differences that fragment populations into opposing camps unable to coexist peacefully.

Beyond ideological disagreement, political polarization increasingly involves social sorting where political identity becomes linked to other aspects of identity including where you live, what media you consume, who your friends are, and how you spend leisure time. This sorting means political disagreements are reinforced by every other aspect of life rather than being contained to voting booth. Urban and rural divide, religious and secular divide, educational divide all increasingly align with partisan divide making politics total identity rather than single dimension of disagreement.

When all your friends share your political views, when everyone in your neighborhood votes the same way, when your news sources confirm your perspective, and when your social activities occur with like-minded people, you lose exposure to opposing viewpoints. The other side becomes abstraction rather than real people you know and interact with. This makes demonization easier because you’re attacking caricature rather than actual humans with understandable if different perspectives.

Affective polarization where people feel hostile toward supporters of opposing parties is rising faster than ideological polarization over actual policy differences. This means the animosity is increasingly personal and emotional rather than based on substantive disagreement. People hate the other side more than their actual policy differences justify, with tribal loyalty and group identity driving the hatred more than rational assessment of competing policy approaches.

Some people would hesitate to permit their child to marry someone affiliated with a disliked political party or would refuse to engage in business with such individuals. Extreme division fractures crucial norms of tolerance and moderation such as gracefully conceding after electoral defeats vital for sustaining healthy political competition. When political difference becomes grounds for refusing social and economic interaction, society fragments into hostile camps that cannot function as unified polity.

Democratic Erosion Feeds Back Into Polarization

Rising political polarization is associated with increased political violence and unpredictable oscillations in government policies according to the latest Political Risk Index. Partisan conflict exacts toll on civil society often leading to vilification of activists and human rights defenders. Even more concerning, divisions can fuel hate crimes and political violence, a trend witnessed in countries like India, Poland, and the United States in recent years.

Polarization creates incentives for democratic erosion as each side views the other as existential threat that must be stopped by any means necessary. This transforms opponents from adversaries within shared democratic system into enemies threatening the system itself. The logic becomes that preserving democracy requires preventing the other side from winning even if that means undermining democratic processes to do so. Both sides convinced of the other’s malign intentions work to restrict the other’s ability to compete fairly, creating downward spiral of democratic decay.

Deeper digitalization can make surveillance easier for governments, companies and threat actors, and this becomes more of a risk as societies polarize further. Individuals’ political views can increasingly be determined even against their will from their online activities. Similarly to individual biases, societal biases can also play a role and these are likely to become more prevalent as societal divisions deepen. Societal polarization is ranked number four over a two-year time horizon with Latin America and the Caribbean, Eastern Asia and Europe manifesting the most pressing concerns.

Increased polarization fosters instability leading to uncertainty for businesses. This situation intensifies the pressure on corporations and their leaders to cultivate trust among consumers, a trust that governments have struggled to achieve. The breakdown of social cohesion makes governance nearly impossible as no policies can achieve broad support and every action by government is interpreted through partisan lens as benefiting one side at the other’s expense.

The Vicious Cycle Accelerates

Polarization is shaking societies across the world from new democracies to long-established ones. Why are political divisions intensifying globally, and what can policymakers learn from other countries’ experiences. Research finds that severe polarization is affected by three primary factors: politicians who divide, economic anxiety and social sorting, and media fragmentation. These factors reinforce each other creating vicious cycle where each element amplifies the others.

Polarization also reverberates throughout the society as whole poisoning everyday interactions and relationships. What starts as political disagreement metastasizes into comprehensive social division affecting families, friendships, workplaces, and communities. The political becomes personal with partisan identity consuming other aspects of identity and relationships, making civil interaction across political lines increasingly impossible.

According to Carothers and O’Donohue, pernicious polarization is a process most often driven by a single political cleavage dominating an otherwise pluralistic political life, overriding other cleavages. On the other hand, Slater and Arugay have argued that it’s not the depth of a single social cleavage but the political elite’s process for removing a leader which best explains whether or not polarization truly becomes pernicious. Regardless of precise mechanisms, the result is same: democratic politics transforms from competitive but cooperative system into zero-sum tribal warfare.

Once severe polarization takes hold, breaking the cycle proves extraordinarily difficult. The incentives push toward ever greater division as politicians find polarization electorally successful, media discovers outrage drives engagement, and citizens retreat into ideological bubbles. Without conscious intervention to change these dynamics, polarization continues accelerating year after year toward outcomes that threaten democratic stability itself. Understanding why this is happening represents first step toward arresting the cycle before political division becomes so severe that democracy cannot survive it.