Political behavior under polarization

Political Polarization is on the rise. This development evokes the question how both voters and politicians behave under polarization and how they interact with each other. The dissertation addresses three facets of political behavior under polarization. Its first two articles analyze how polarization affects retrospective voting behavior and election results. Both studies build on formal theory and assumptions from behavioral public choice. The results deliver multiple predictions that can be tested empirically. The third and fourth articles comprise field experiments that aim to investigate political elite's behavior towards polarized voters. Both experiments were conducted during election campaigning phases and dealt with a polarizing topic. The results provide limited evidence of racial discrimination and suggest that vote maximizing motives drive the politicians' response behavior. Thus, the voter's ideology rather than the voter's socio-demographic traits explains the politicians' interaction with polarized voters. The fifth article considers whether politicians of the Greens and of the AfD politicized the issue immigration in German state parliaments during the peak of the so-called "refugee crisis". Using qualitative instead of standard quantitative criteria to measure politicization, the analysis shows that politicians of the AfD politicized the topic immigration more intensely than their Green counterparts. To sum up, the dissertation corroborates various strands of literature on political behavior under polarization and adds insights from different angles and employing different methods.