THE INFLUENCE OF POLITICAL POLARIZATION ON INTERPERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS AND SOCIAL TRUST

Abstract

Political polarization has started playing the major role in the contemporary democratic society which is fundamentally altering not only the electoral race, but the entire social life, the social unity and the institutional legitimacy. In as much as ideological differentiation is needed in the discourse of democracy, the differentiation is unnecessarily polarized to produce a sense of emotional aggression, physical separation, and a diminishing degree of interpersonal trust. The paper establishes a model of multidimensional analysis to provide a solution to the impacts of political polarization on interpersonal relationships and social trust at a community level. The invented indicator system was based on 6 orientations, such as social interaction, media exposure, psychological perception, institutional confidence, civic engagement, and digital communication behavior. According to the survey results received among 1,720 respondents, the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was employed to calculate the latent dimension of the polarization and resilience of trust. There were five primary components that explained over 54% of variance. This was then followed by a binary logistic regression model which would be used to predict the possibility of people exhibiting low or high social trust based on these factors. The results have shown that affective polarization and perceived psychological threat is an important predictor of interpersonal avoidance, conflict frequency, and distrust, and institutional trust and civic engagement is a stabilizing measure. Spatial and demographic analyses also indicate that, the urban populations which are institutionally buffered experience the high polarization created by the media and the semi-urban communities that are interpersonally cohesive but more prone to misinformation. The results lead to the conclusion that the policy mechanisms of reducing the process of social fragmentation brought about by polarization have to be introduced with the media literacy, systems of community dialogue and institutional inherency.