Animosity in Place: The Geography of Political Animosity, its Economic Origins, Political Catalysts, and Social Antidotes

Abstract

Animosity is central to contemporary electoral politics: many people vote ‘against’ a party rather than ‘for’ a party, citizens support populists with feelings of anger and resentment, and political discourse on social media is full of expressions of animosity. Where does this animosity come from? In the rather disparate literatures that speak to this question, there is a broad dualism. Some view rising animosity as a “bottom-up socioeconomic phenomenon” focusing on people’s adverse economic experiences, while others interpret this as a more “top-down political phenomenon” driven by partisan political conflict and the rhetoric of populist politicians. This dissertation adjudicates between these views, explaining when and where each process is in major action. I argue that adverse economic situations produced high levels of political animosity in relatively declining places before the rise of populists. This animosity contributed to the political support for right-wing populists, whose rhetoric and electoral success in turn have provoked sharp increases in political animosity in relatively prospering places. To test this place-based sequential theory, I develop a novel measure of political animosity that is geographically fine-grained and covers three developed democracies (the U.S., France, and Korea) and the past decade (2013-2022), by applying deep learning language models to 3 billion geo-located tweets. Results in all three countries consistently support the sequential theory. The dissertation then explores how the targets of political animosity have changed over time both in declining and prospering places, and asks whether the social fabric of each place can work as an antidote or amplifier to the development of political animosity. Together, this study presents a framework connecting multiple literatures and provides evidence for a comprehensive theory explaining the rise of political animosity over the past decade.