How polarized is Europe? Public opinion disagreement, issue alignment, and sorting across European countries

Whereas attitudinal polarization has become a hot topic for academic debates in the USA over recent decades, the question of whether, and over which issues, European countries are polarized has so far received limited scholarly attention. Existing studies focus on single countries and different types of attitudinal polarization, not allowing for cross-national comparisons. This article provides such a comparison of the state of attitudinal polarization across 21 EU member states. Using the EVS-2017 data, we study three types of attitudinal polarization (disagreement, issue alignment, and sorting) over five key attitudinal dimensions: social inequality, immigration, EU-integration, gender, and environment. Contrary to prominent claims of a polarized Europe, our findings indicate medium levels of opinion disagreement, low levels of alignment and low but slightly higher levels of sorting. We further find that different types of attitudinal polarization do not coincide with each other on a country level but do produce geographical clusters. Polarization as disagreement is higher in the East and South of Europe, while issue alignment and sorting are higher in the North and West. Looking at the three types of polarization together, immigration is slightly more divisive than other dimensions. However, contrary to the new cultural cleavage expectations, disagreement over social inequality is still remarkably high, especially in the South and East of Europe.