Affective political polarization: how to operationalize the concept due to estimation of the hate speech in the political online communication

Abstract

This article introduces an approach to operationalize the concept of affective political polarization through the evaluation of hate speech in social media. The paper shows the relevance of such an approach and what are its key advantages over survey and experimental methods. First, the article explains why affective polarization can be assessed through "footprints" of political online communication – user’s messages in communities. It then proposes an indicator for this assessment – hate speech, which is linked to affective polarization through social identity theory. The main conclusion of the study is that hate speech as an element of online communication can be considered a relatable indicator of affective polarization – this opens new possibilities for collecting empirical material to explore affective polarization.