Institutional design and polarisation: do consensus democracies fare better in fighting polarisation than majoritarian democracies?

It is often claimed that we are living in an age of increasing polarisation (Gidron et al. 2019; Westwood et al. 2018). Political views, opinions, and identities become increasingly irreconcilable (idea-based polarisation), while at the same time society appears to be getting fractured in antagonistic, opposing camps (identity-based polarisation). However, a closer look at international datasets reveals that these forms of polarisation do not affect all democracies to the same extent. Levels of identity-based and idea-based polarisation strongly vary across countries, with some exhibiting steeply rising levels of polarisation, and others showing remarkable stability. The question then becomes what can explain these widely diverging levels of polarisation. In this paper we hypothesize that the institutional design of a country impacts polarisation. Based on a quantitative analysis of the Comparative Political Dataset (Armingeon et al. 2021) and Varieties of Democracy data (Coppedge et al. 2021a) in 36 countries over time (2000-2019), we argue that consensus democracies will be better at dealing with polarisation than majoritarian democracies. After all, consensus democracies are historically designed to reduce conflict and divisions among the population. This paper will therefore evaluate the impact of institutional contexts on identity-based and issue-based forms of polarisation in an attempt to enhance our knowledge about these complex phenomena.