Establishing the construct and predictive validity of brief measures of affective polarization
Open accessAbstract
Measuring affective polarization, defined as the liking for one's political ingroup and the dislike for political outgroups, poses methodological challenges in multiparty systems: evaluations of seven, 13 or even more parties in a survey are costly, time‐consuming and demanding. Some studies therefore use subsets of parties to create brief affective polarization measures. However, it is unclear how this affects the construct and predictive validity of these brief measures, potentially causing problematic inferences. Across 39 countries ( N = >66 , >880 ), we demonstrate that brief measures that include ratings of only three to five parties can maintain acceptable validity, as illustrated by strong correlations with full measures and consistent associations with political correlates. The construct and predictive validity of brief measures are best when selecting a set of large, ideologically diverse parties. We provide specific recommendations for the effective measurement of affective polarization in different multiparty systems.
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Asking people to rate selected political parties representing different ranges of the political spectrum does as well as asking survey respondents to rate all parties in a multi-party system.
“In a study tracking the measurement validity of affective polarization measures in a multi-party system, for example, Kasper et al. (2025) find that asking people to rate selected political parties representing different ranges of the political spectrum does as well as asking survey respondents to rate all parties in a multi-party system.”
From Measuring affective polarization: Matching concepts to measures (2026) · cites this paper as Kasper et al., 2025
The Conclusion says that ratings of three to five parties can preserve construct and predictive validity compared with full measures. It also says that maintaining high validity requires selecting an ideologically diverse set of large parties; the citing sentence mentions ideological range but omits the party-size condition. (LLM, conf=0.82)
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Cites
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- Authors
- Kasper, J., Schumacher, G., & Bakker, B. N.
- Affiliations
- University of Amsterdam (NL)
- Corresponding author
- Kasper, Jakob
- Venue
- European Journal of Political Research
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press (CUP)
- Published
- 2025-11
- Volume
- 64
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 2146-2160
- ISSN
- 0304-4130 (ISSN-L)
- 1475-6765
- OpenAlex
- W4410017068
- Semantic Scholar
- 2a7ddc1594457fe7a0e293a3142b5c03984704ee
- Cited by
- 5
- References
- 33
- Citations by year
- 2026: 3 · 2025: 2
- FWCI
- 18.50
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- European Journal of Political Research (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- UvA-DARE (University of Amsterdam) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- Social Science Open Access Repository (GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (VI.Vidi.211.055)
- HORIZON EUROPE European Innovation Council (759079)
- H2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (101072992)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › Electoral Systems and Political Participation
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Social and Intergroup Psychology
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Management Science and Operations Research › Psychometric Methodologies and Testing
- Keywords
- affective polarization, brief measures, construct validity, predictive validity, party identification, political outgroups, multiparty system, ideological diversity, cross-national survey data
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