TRANSNATIONAL

TRANSNATIONAL seeks to explain polarisation in Western societies on immigration, international governance, and climate change. One side embraces open societies, cultural diversity, and international governance; the other considers these as a threat to their national community and their way of life. We describe this as a transnational cleavage which has its roots in an information revolution that started in the 1960s and picked up steam from the 1990s. We believe it signifies a critical juncture in Western democracies no less decisive than previous junctures detected by Lipset and Rokkan in their 1967 classic.

Beyond the effect of individual demographics on political attitudes, little is known about how social interaction shapes affective polarisation. We combine insights from cleavage theory, identity theory, and social networks to examine the individual-social nexus in Europe and the United States by means of surveys, natural experiments, and interviews.

A key focus of this project is the power of education in structuring grievances, identities, and durable conflict on the sociocultural divide. We have discovered that it is not only the level of education, but equally its substance – the field of education –that explains who stands where and why on the divide. A chief goal of the TRANSNATIONAL is to map the role and meaning of education, develop elegant measures of level and field that travel across time and space, and evaluate their causal power in shaping and sustaining divisions.

This research is funded by a five-year advanced ERC grant #885026 (2021-2026). Liesbet Hooghe is the Principal Investigator, and Gary Marks is the Senior Researcher – they direct the programme jointly.