Polarizing policy opinions with conflict framed information: activating negative views of political parties in a multi-party system

Policy news often places emphasis on conflict between political parties. This partisan conflict is expected to motivate people to distance their own opinions away from the policy positions of antagonistic political parties (i.e., opinion polarization). This paper tests if opinion polarization occurs in a multi-party system when people are exposed to conflict framed information. We use an experimental design which exposes participants (N = 256) to a news article about unemployment benefits. This news article is adapted for each respondent to focus on the political party s/he dislikes the most. This ensures that each participant is exposed to polarizing policy information. The news article is then manipulated by altering the policy position of the antagonistic political party (i.e., support or opposition) and the framing of the story (i.e., conflict vs. no conflict). The results show that respondents are less in favor of the unemployment policy when the antagonistic political party supports this policy, and a conflict framing is applied. However, the policy positions of this antagonistic party do not affect policy support when partisan conflict is not emphasized.