Abstract
There is strong evidence that the rise of political polarization increases biases, prejudices, and public hostility toward people from certain socially disadvantaged groups, among other things. As a result, cases of testimonial and discursive injustice are more likely to happen. It is more likely that disenfranchised people’s claims are given less credibility than deserved and that their words are taken as performing a different speech act from the intended one, or even that they are prevented from performing certain speech acts. The aim of this chapter is to explore which of the two prominent notions of polarization in the literature is better positioned to account for this relation. These notions are ideological polarization and affective polarization. The former is mostly characterized by the distance between certain belief contents in an ideological spectrum, while the latter has more to do with people’s willingness to like the ingroup and dislike the outgroup, which is tied to a certain level of credence in the beliefs of the group one identifies with. In particular, we argue that affective polarization is better positioned than ideological polarization to explain the relationship between the increase in polarization and the increase in certain injustices.
