讲座预告 | Who Do People Blame for Affective Polarization?

Who Do People Blame for Affective Polarization?

人们将情感两极分化归咎于谁？

Affective polarization—animosity toward out-group partisans compared to copartisans—is central to discussions of the contemporary American political landscape, but the literature has not fully addressed whom people blame for the rise of partisan animosity. We analyze how people judge the relative responsibilities of different entities to affective polarization by leveraging ranking survey questions with bias correction for random responses. On average, people blame politicians the most, then traditional media, social media, interest groups, and lastly, citizens. Strong partisan differences exist in blame for traditional media, with leaning and weak Republicans (not strong Republicans) displaying strong blame attribution towards them compared to other entities. The findings of Prof. Kim's research suggest that a gap between depolarization research and citizen perceptions on root causes of polarization may impact the efficacy of possible interventions, and that more research is needed to understand why anti-press attitudes might not be linear with respect to partisanship.

情感两极分化是指个体相较于本党派成员，对外党派成员所持有的更强敌意。这一现象已成为理解当代美国政治格局的核心议题。然而，现有文献尚未充分探讨：当人们感知到党派间敌意加剧时，他们究竟将责任归咎于哪些主体？Kim教授的研究通过采用经偏差校正的随机排名调查方法，系统分析了公众对不同实体在推动情感极化中所承担责任的认知排序。结果显示，受访者普遍将最大责任归于政客，其次依次为传统媒体、社交媒体、利益集团，最后是普通公民。值得注意的是，在对“传统媒体”的责任归因上，存在显著的党派差异：与民主党人及其他群体相比，共和党人及弱共和党人（非坚定支持者） 对传统媒体表现出更为强烈的指责倾向。该研究揭示了一个重要缺口——当前关于两极分化的学术讨论，与公众对其根源的认知之间存在明显脱节。这种认知落差可能削弱政策干预的实际效果。

Seo-young Silvia Kim is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Seoul National University. She received her Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology in 2020, and was formerly at American University as an Assistant Professor (2020–2023) and at Sogang University (2023–2024). She works on American politics, political methodology and computational social sciences with an emphasis on political behavior, election administration and money in politics. She also builds methods to calculate and address measurement biases in administrative data and surveys.

Seo-young Silvia Kim是首尔国立大学政治学与国际关系系助理教授。她于2020年从加州理工学院获得博士学位，曾于 2020-2023年在美利坚大学担任助理教授，2023-2024年在韩国西江大学担任助理教授。她的研究领域包括美国政治、政治方法论和计算社会科学，重点关注政治行为、选举管理以及政治中的资金流动。她还开发了用于识别并纠正行政数据与调查中测量偏差的计算方法。