Elite Conflicts and Their Effects on Political Support as a Function of Elite and Mass Polarization By Gergő Závecz Submitted to Central European University Doctoral School of Political Science, Public Policy and International Relations In partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science Supervisor: Gábor Tóka CEU eTD Collection Budapest, Hungary April 2017 Copyright Notice I hereby declare that this dissertation contains no materials accepted for any other degrees in any other institutions. This dissertation contains no materials previously written and/or published by another person, except where appropriate acknowledgment is made in the form of bibliographical reference. Gergő Závecz Budapest, April 5, 2017 CEU eTD Collection ii Abstract The main contribution of this dissertation is the exploration of how a certain type of disconnection between the political elite and citizens may impact support for the democratic political system. Specifically, this dissertation is concerned with how differences in elite and mass polarization mediate the effects of conflicts, verbal attacks and negativity among partisan elites on support for the political system. I find that it is not the frequently loathed conflict-rich talk of politicians in itself that raises negative feelings among the citizens about the political system and the actors. Rather, the effect occurs when differences in polarization between political elites and their followers are especially pronounced. Thus, the dissertation contributes to the political communication literature by identifying the condition under which negativity, disagreements and conflict-rich talk among politicians creates negative citizen attitudes towards how democracy works. The implication is that it is not the natural tendency of the democratic process to generate visible displays of elite conflict that makes citizens dislike democratic politics, but when it coincides with an apparent oversupply of ideological polarization among elites relative to how much citizens themselves get divided on an ideological basis. Chapter 2 uses three waves of European Election Study (EES) data to show that elite polarization increases how conflictual EU-related news are prior to a European Parliament (EP) election. Chapter 3 uses a dataset on university students in 24 countries prior to the 2014 EP election and finds that when citizens are more polarized, the same campaign debate is perceived as being less negative by them. Chapter 4 again uses EES data to examine the main CEU eTD Collection empirical argument of the dissertation. It finds that in countries where elites are more polarized than the electorate, support for the political system is more strongly undermined by exposure to explicit conflicts between politicians than elsewhere. Finally, in Chapter 5, based on a survey of a representative sample of the online population in a country with a clear iii disconnect between elite and mass polarization on EU issues, I test whether conflictual rhetoric in such contexts in fact hurts popular support for democracy as the previous findings suggest. In general, the dissertation partly supports and partly complements the elite integration theory outlined by John Higley (most recently in 2010), namely that strong elite divisions bring uncertainty and decreasing support among citizens for the entire political system. The dissertation shows that when partisan elites are divided to a larger extent than their supporters in the electorate, even less harsh debates are seen by citizens as more conflictual, and this decreases political support. However, my results also show that when elites differ little from the masses in how politically polarized they are, or when masses are more polarized, citizens are less sensitive to expressions of elite debates, perceive less negativity in politics, and their support for regimes does not decrease significantly when exposed to signs of elite conflict. These results support that citizens react to elite behavior: when citizens have to listen to endless elite disagreements and conflict-rich talk on a particular issue in which they are more or less united, this bothers them, and they articulate their distaste in the form of decreasing political support for the system that produced these endless disagreements. CEU eTD Collection iv Acknowledgements I have worked on this dissertation for almost six years, have been inspired during this process by experiences of a much longer period of time. This makes it hard to thank everyone who helped me finishing my work by some means. However, let me try to do so. First, I would like to thank my supervisors, Gábor Tóka, Levente Littvay and Zoltán Miklósi for all the guidance they gave me through the process. Gábor was my MA supervisor, and has helped me through the PhD process as well. I remember the first time we met, I wanted to ask him to be my supervisor, but I did not even have a topic. He accepted the suggestion anyways, and since then I have always been happy to work with him. He contributed to so many of my chapters both directly by talking about them, and by collecting data together, and indirectly by introducing me to scholars with whom I could work on related research. So, thank you Gábor! I am also grateful to Levente. I remember him talking about the Political Behavior Research Group (PolBeRG) on my very first day as a CEU MA student at the welcome reception, and how he said that I would be a great fit for the group. Since then he gave me so much support, as I was his TA and received the Best TA award, and as I selected my dissertation topic based on a final paper written for one of his courses. Thanks again Levi! I would also like to thank Zoltán for all the valuable insights he gave me to make this dissertation theoretically more coherent. I am grateful to my external supervisor, Diana C. Mutz. She helped me to be a visiting scholar for a semester at the University of Pennsylvania, one of the greatest universities in the world. She gave me perspective, as she helped me to structure this dissertation, and helped me CEU eTD Collection to find the most relevant research questions. Diana and her husband Robin Pemantle were always happy to meet me when I was in the US, and I am genuinely grateful for the Thanksgiving Dinners I could spend with them and their children. v I am very grateful to all of my other professors and teachers from primary school to university, who all formed the way I see the world, and without whom I would never have written these lines. I would especially like to thank three of my greatest inspirations from the ELTE Apáczai Csere János High School: Zoltán Falta, Péter Nagy Sz. and Miklós Száray. I am also grateful to all of my fellow graduate students at CEU, many of whom provided me with relevant insights (especially Constantin Manuel Bosancianu). Attendees at conferences (Political Psychology Networking Conference for the Post-Communist Region, Annual Doctoral Conferences at CEU, Annual Conference of the Hungarian Political Science Association, MPSA and APSA), where I presented parts of my dissertation, also gave me valuable feedback, so I am grateful to them as well. Chapter 5 would have never been written without the technical and substantial contribution and expertise of PolBeRG members (especially Anna Csonka, Gábor Simonovits and Federico Vegetti) to the collection of two different data sets in 2012 and 2014. The collection of the dataset used in Chapter 3 is a result of a joint effort by several universities across Europe (special thanks go to Jürgen Maier and Thorsten Faas, leaders of the research), and I would like to thank the leaders and members of the Peripato (especially Róbert Tardos, Zoltán Kmetty and Nikosz Fokasz), without whose support I would not have been able to participate in this study. I am also grateful to the Varieties of Democracy Project, the Political Participation – An International Comparative Research Project, and especially to its main Hungarian researcher, Zsolt Enyedi, as well as to the Equinox Consulting Ltd., who all gave me rewarding part time CEU eTD Collection jobs with flexible work schedules, and thus financial stability and opportunity for working on the dissertation once my university stipend run out. I would also like to thank Eszter Timár, who is probably reading these acknowledgements, and tries to delete all the unnecessary “rather”s I placed in the text, for all vi the help in editing. She has been a great help not only to finish this dissertation, but also for many of my term papers and articles over the years. Five years ago, when I was an MA student at CEU, and I was waiting for the results of my PhD application, I promised to a group of friends that if I got accepted I would mention them in the acknowledgments. I do not like broken promises, and I would not like to leave anyone else out, so let me thank: Artúr, Ata, Ati, two Attila-s, two Ádám-s, Ági, Balu, Bálint, Bea, Beus, Bécó, Csomi, two Dani-s, two Dávid-s, Detti, Dia, Ekka, Gábor, Győző, Gyuri, Hunor, Juli, Kende, Kristóf, Kriszti, Krisztike, Laci, Lacika, Levi, Lívia, Marci, Máté, Milán, Panda, Patrik, Réka, Soma, Szihám, Tamás, Tibi, Viki, Vivien and Zsoca. I also thank for their patience my closest friends whose invitations were so frequently turned down during the following years with the explanation that I do not have time since I am working on my dissertation: Dávid (Viszoki), the two Gábor-s (Imri and Pápai), József (Bogdán), the two Roland-s (Györkös and Reiner), the two Tamás-s (Szerbin and Takács), Péter (Koleszár), Tibor (Pikó), and two Zoltán-s (Csaba and Kovács). Finally, my utmost gratitude goes to my family. I remember my grandparents, who always motivated me to be a good student, since they wanted me to reach far.