Keywords: Political behavior, participation and culture

The political climate in the United States is currently characterized by divisiveness, partisanship, and polarization. Perhaps in response to this climate, many scholars and political professionals now believe that campaigning for out-partisans is a waste of time and resources. Not only is it impossible to persuade individual voters to change parties, the story goes, one may actually exacerbate affective polarization by creating a backlash effect among partisans through contact with the opposing campaign. As a result, it has become common practice for prominent political campaigns (e.g., Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign) to ignore specific states and regions where out-partisans are thought to be the majority. This study challenges these assumptions by examining whether contact with the “other” party during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign reduced affective polarization in the American electorate over the course of the election season. Affective polarization refers to the steady growth of mutual dislike between partisans, and reducing it is one of the major challenges facing American politics in the current era of political contentiousness. Affective polarization contributes to a general breakdown in public deliberation processes, and it is associated with intergroup prejudice, the avoidance of non-likeminded others, and polarized election campaigns. To this point, most of the research on affective polarization has identified partisanship and ideology as causal factors. Less research has examined how to reduce the influence of partisanship on affective polarization, although some work shows that contact with the “other side” in politics may provide one promising avenue of inquiry. While that research focuses on contact with other citizens, the current study proposes to focus on contact with the other political party during a presidential election campaign. Based on the “contact hypothesis,” which suggests that contact with out-groups can improve intergroup relations, this study hypothesizes that contact with the out-party during the campaign will reduce the influence of partisanship on affective polarization over time. To test this hypothesis, the study relies on the American National Election Studies (ANES) 2016 two-wave survey, which is representative of English- or Spanish-speaking citizens of the United States (18+). The first wave was collected in September 2016, two months before the presidential election. The second wave was collected after the election between November 2016 and January 2017 (N = 2,464). The ANES uses a mixed-mode survey methodology: Face-to-face interviews were conducted based on a multi-stage stratified sampling technique (RR1 = 50%), and they were complemented with an online (CASI) sample (mail recruitment, random sample of American households, RR1 = 44%). The questionnaires for the two modes were identical. Preliminary results from autoregressive ordinary least squares (OLS) regression analysis are generally supportive of the hypothesis, and show that contact from the other party significantly reduces the magnitude of the relationship between partisan identity and affective polarization. Results will be discussed in light of ongoing scholarly conversations about campaigns, affective polarization, and the general state of political discourse in the United States.