Does “polarization” mean what we think it does? And are we?

People are talking a lot about polarization these days—commentators on the news, writers, people at the coffee shop or the pub. We seem to be talking like it’s a done deal—our society is clearly polarized, our political dialogue is divided, etc. But after digging into a bunch of background info and some stats over the last couple of years, my takeaway on this question of whether Canadians are polarized is a resounding “sort of.” In some ways, yes; in some ways, no. And with a few angles I had not expected. 

I started pulling on this thread because I, like many others, was growing concerned that our society and communities are fracturing. The Ottawa Freedom Convoy was a particular flashpoint, where Canadian political relations got so not-boring that the international media even paid attention to us for a while. Since then, things have felt pretty chaotic, with continued protests, one of the nastier sessions of Parliament in living memory, and other fun warning signs. Anyone who dares to read comments on social media in a moment of ill-advised curiosity ends up feeling a bit nauseated and an urge to run to the hills. 

That said, I was a bit surprised at some of what I learned by digging into the details of polarization. Namely, that Canadians are not actually at heart all that polarized. Even Americans are not as polarized as we might think. As British MP Jo Cox said, “We are far more united and have far more in common than that which divides us.” The sad fact that a neo-Nazi extremist murdered her might, at first glance, seem to refute her own declaration. But I actually think our shared alarm about those extremes reinforces the validity of her words—we’ll come back to that. 

When Canadians are asked in surveys to declare their political leanings from more left/liberal to more right/conservative, we see a bell curve—most people are towards the middle, with a few on the extreme margins. In the U.S. these days, it looks more like a W, with higher extremes on the outside but still with a healthy middle. (It’s also worth noting that the extreme right side of the U.S. survey fell to 11% in 2023, a substantial drop that doesn’t seem to fit with the turmoil at that time. Over 40% of Americans define themselves as being in the middle, compared to about 65% of Canadians.)

Source: AmericasBarometer Survey, 2021 by the Environics Institute

At first glance, this might not seem to jibe with our experience these days, with our growing sense of social discord. “Just look around!”, you might say. The problem is that a lot of what we look at these days is some form of mediated information, whether from the mass (aka legacy) media, social media, podcasts, or some rando’s blog. Most of it tends to be anecdotal and not very statistical, with eye/ear-catching examples designed to grab our attention. (Yes, I’m aware that “most” is not a statistic. But good catch.) What we see on these various media platforms tweaks our brain’s highly flawed interpretation process that the psychologist Daniel Kahneman labelled WYSIATI (“what you see is all there is”)—the same mental process that has us over-estimating the chances of dying in a plane crash and under-estimating death rates by common factors like heart disease and diabetes. 

It’s worth distinguishing polarization of identities vs. polarization on issues. Most Canadians don’t form strong political identities. The data shown above proves that our society is not divided into groups of left and right political ideologues. In fact, as any election strategist knows, the vast majority of people are not ideological at all. You can’t reach them with the kind of messages that political partisans lap up at party conventions. Over the modern era, Canada has seen huge swings in voting patterns, with many people deciding to vote for a different person/party than they did the last time. That’s a good sign for a healthy democracy.

Every so often, there are either/or issues that naturally split us into distinct camps—the free trade debate of the 1988 election, gay marriage, and COVID-19 vaccine mandates all come to mind. In these cases, that majority of people in the middle of the bell curve are forced to pick a side. It’s inherently polarizing. But those divisions shouldn’t be mistaken for the hardening of political identities—they’re of a moment and tend to pass, though maybe with lingering impacts. 

That should all be comforting to some degree. On the data, Canada does not seem to be descending into the more polarized morass we see to the south. But there’s still something brewing in the air, isn’t there? Even if the data doesn’t show terrible polarization, there are still some early warning signs that we should take seriously.  

One warning sign is a rise in what the political science types call “affective polarization.” “Affect” refers to how people feel, and some data shows that people are feeling worse and worse about others with different points of view. The U.S. is looking pretty dire, with an ever-growing number of Americans saying they wouldn’t want their kids marrying someone who votes for the other party. Even in Canada, our views of those who disagree with us appears to be deteriorating, and our misperceptions about them are increasing. I suspect things would be much worse if we had only two political parties and everyone had to choose a side. Over time, more people would sort themselves into one camp or the other, as our U.S. neighbours have been doing for several decades. If this was our reality, the power of human group instincts (more on that in another blog) would start to work its dark magic, and the ends of our bell curve would begin to curl upwards.  

A photo of the January 6 U.S. Capitol Attack. Image via Wikimedia Commons

Then there’s the loss of trust and confidence in our public institutions, including government, media, police, central banks, universities, and scientists. Let’s be clear: holding these folks accountable and speaking truth to power is absolutely part of a strong democracy. But blanket labelling of them all being corrupt, co-opted, dishonest, etc., is not real accountability. There are concerning trends about this kind of mistrust, which seems to be dividing along gender lines and among age groups. Throw in a fractured media landscape, where anybody can find “information” that confirms their perspective, and we’ve got trouble brewing. I worry when I hear people talk about how hard it is to find unbiased media these days, and their stated solution is to look at more grassroots information. 

Although most people don’t form strong political identities, we all form social identities. It’s in our nature as group animals to align with those around us, which is all fine, except that this instinct comes with the side effect of wariness about other groups. The behavioural impact of our group instincts is sometimes astonishing and warrants a whole other blog post. For now, suffice it to say that this natural social tendency (from which not even Sneetches are immune) leads us to form narratives about other groups (“those star-bellied bastards are always so self-interested”). And this pattern is getting a super-charged jolt from our increasingly isolated information bubbles. 

These days, we rarely take the time (or have the time, it seems) for in-depth conversations, especially not with people who tend to differ from us. We’ve always had social bubbles to some extent, but our echo chambers are tighter than ever. We don’t often look at a diverse group of people in the face and ask what’s really up for them, what they care about. Even people that start a conversation with cookie-cutter rhetoric (“none of these politicians give a damn about anything”) can usually be coaxed to begin sharing something more substantive with a couple of well-placed questions. 

Back to the tragic murder of British MP Jo Cox and the issue of extremism. Strong rhetoric and extreme views seem to be growing in a way that would have been totally alien to Canadians a generation or two ago. This seems to be trickling down our media chains and occasionally erupting into extreme events like the Freedom Convoy or straight-up acts of violence and terrorism. (We’ve even had some recent experience with violent political extremism here in Canada. In 2014, a gunman stormed the National War Memorial and Parliament buildings, killing Corporal Nathan Cirillo. In 2020, a very troubled man with some guns in his truck wanted to visit the PM at home and drove through the gates to Rideau Cottage.)

Freedom Convoy trucks. Image via Pixabay

However, as some have pointed out, we should be careful about mistaking extremism for polarization. At the same time, we should be concerned when we see more extreme language creeping its way down the political ladder and re-writing our norms to the point where accusing other people of lying or treason becomes more commonplace.

Media in its various forms are where more extreme views go to flourish. They grab attention, get reactions, and paint a false picture of what’s generally going on in our communities. Even the more traditional media are not immune from the “if it bleeds, it leads” and clickbait factors. With a flooded and fractured media landscape, extreme views are flourishing and sucking up our attention bandwidth like never before, to the exclusion of honest discussions with real people. That’s why we started this little project called Grey Matters in the first place—to reclaim some of that middle ground, to connect groups of diverse people, and to dig past that rhetoric wall.