B Morgen Makombo Sikwila
Nearly all Zimbabweans agree that our country has been so polarized. Polarization in Zimbabwe today affects every level of society —families, congregations, workplaces, communities, and the country as a whole. If we are to successfully overcome polarization, we must first look deeply into its roots.
Some effects of polarization are quite obvious. Extended families arguing politics at the dinner tables, competing bumper stickers in the congregational parking lot, and nasty exchanges on social media.
Yet the underlying causes of polarization are very opaque. What causes a family, congregation, or society to polarize?
Beliefs cause political polarization. Beliefs are cognitive structures that allow us to make fast decisions without conscious thoughts. Each one of us has many beliefs of varying strengths. Beliefs help us make sense of our world, provide simple explanations for the complex or unknown phenomenon, and guide our day-to-day decision-makings.
People with strong beliefs often cannot tolerate uncertainty, ambiguity, complexity, and anxiety. Their belief systems soothe them and protect them from dealing with the challenges of modernity. This is why we see many black men, uneducated or educated slightly above illiteracy line mostly holding strong beliefs. Higher education helps people learn discernment and critical thinking skills.
Political polarization occurs when beliefs become deeply entrenched.
When people hold deep beliefs and are confronted with true but contradictory facts, their brains release dopamine. This has the effect of reinforcing beliefs against change, even when the beliefs are completely wrong. You can call this the physiological explanation of stubbornness.
People become more entrenched and stubborn when their beliefs are challenged by truth, not less. Political polarization occurs when out-of-integrity political leaders unconsciously play to this quirk in the brain. People who may be inclined to believe one way or the other can be induced to strengthen their beliefs by perceived “others” who are labeled as “enemies.”
Thus, “lock her up” and “fake news” work insidiously to strengthen wrong beliefs against truth in brains that are unable to deal with uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. This explains why certain supporters are unwavering in their support of cult leaders.
To have a calm conversation with the politically polarized, one must be able to read and reflect emotions. This is called affect labeling. When you have learned this skill, you may engage a politically polarized person with the following questions: What in your life history and experience led you to have the beliefs you hold today? How do your beliefs guide you in your everyday decision-making? How do you deal with people who hold beliefs that are opposite of yours? How should our society manage people with radically different beliefs and attitudes?
As an individual who is politically polarized person answers these questions, simply reflect back their emotions, not their words, with a “you” statement. As this conversation unrolls, most people find that they have far more in common than differences. These conversations are an antidote to political polarization.
The other greatest culprit driving political polarization may be growing economic stratification or unequal economic distribution. Economic inequality strongly correlates with political polarization. As the gap between the richest and the poorest citizens increases, political polarization rises as well. Such correlation is equally evident at the macro level—across multiple countries. Those countries with the greatest gap between the rich and the poor (such as Brazil and Zimbabwe) tend to experience the highest levels of political polarization, whereas the countries with the smallest wealth gaps (such as in northern Europe) experience lower levels of polarization.
In social identity theory, the groups with which we identify are an important source not only of belonging but also of self-esteem. Thus, individual members of an identity group are particularly likely to exhibit hostility toward other groups if they feel their status is threatened. Social identity theory and its concept of status threat help us understand why voters might respond to a leader who promises to renew the real or perceived declining status of an identity group.
Racism may also be a significant implicit driver of polarization. The legacy of enslavement and the reality of ongoing systemic racism produced profound racial inequities. Research suggests that when voters believe that members of a disadvantaged minority are unfairly “getting ahead,” they respond positively to “grievance narratives.”
Like racism, sexism and gender discrimination continue to affect societies. While men are much more likely to vote than women, gender does not seem to be the prime contributor to polarization. The class gap between college-educated women and non-college educated women is much larger than the gender gap between women and men. While class, race, and gender all matter in determining voting patterns, the most significant contributors to polarization in Africa appear to be economic inequality and resentment. When voters feel abandoned and bypassed, they are particularly vulnerable to populist and nationalist messages.
Ethics professor Jonathan Haidt in The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, suggests that “morality is the key to understanding humanity.” Because every human being exists both as an individual and as part of a larger society, we are subject to “parochial altruism.” Parochial altruism tends to produce generous and empathetic behaviors within a group but exclusionary or even violent behaviors with outsiders. The result can be a toxic tribalism or nationalism—a “my group is right or wrong” attitude that excludes or harms others. It’s possible that those on the extremes of our current polarized divide occupy two differing moral universes.
When it comes to polarization, no country is not exceptional. Identity threat seems to be driving the rise in populism and nationalism around the world. One primary response to that threat is the growing worldwide pressure to limit immigration and to build walls. British author Tim Marshall charts the primary reason for building walls: fear. Whether designed to keep out the barbarians or immigrants, or to separate ethno-religious group, walls are generally built to reduce anxieties. As symbols of protection and exclusion, however, walls can be remarkably powerful. Walls represent artifacts of our injustices and our fears. They are symptoms, not causes.
Numerous authors have identified the increasingly stratified media and polarized social media (such as affinity groups on Facebook and X) as the cause of polarization. Yet there is substantial evidence that the proliferation of news sources reflects increasing polarization more than it contributes to it. The primary evidence for this claim is the fact that social scientists have been tracking increasing polarization among the public since the early 1980s—well before Facebook, Twitter, (X) or Fox News existed. The human tendency to seek out evidence supporting preexisting biases has been around for millennia. “Confirmation bias” is a well-established phenomenon that predates the rise of social media.
Political leaders draw lines of their voting constituencies in a way that benefits them. The first is institutional, the so-called gerrymandering. The term refers to the concept of political leaders drawing the lines of their voting constituencies in a way that benefits them. For example, a political incumbent will try to draw the lines of the constituency a way that makes it more solidly his or her party. This has been happening for a long time and in many countries. But it has arguably reached new levels in the Africa with recent redistricting or delimitation. During the 1990s, maybe more than a hundred house districts would be competitive. Today, much less than that are truly competitive in a non-wave election cycle.
Perhaps one cause of modern polarization is our centuries-old “winner take all” political system. Rather than establishing a parliamentary system that apportioned representation based on the percentage of the vote obtained, the crafters of Constitutions that awards seats to a particular parties based purely on a majority vote in each of constituencies. Such a system, particularly given the rise of a two-party system that the founders did not anticipate, contribute to the polarization we are now experiencing. An additional structural hypothesis is that gerrymandering is the cause of the extreme polarization that we now see in Zimbabwe. However, while gerrymandering may indeed contribute to polarization, there is little evidence that it is a primary cause. As with our polarized media, gerrymandering may be more a consequence and an accelerator of polarization than a primary cause.
While African countries are polarizing, so are voters. The problem is that growing homogeneity corresponds with increasing extremism, as individuals who participate in only like-minded groups tend to develop more extreme views. At times one cannot blame gerrymandering but, gentrification and other social trends for the increase in constituencies primarily composed of like-minded people. As much as we would like to fault our political leaders and the media for the polarization we are now experiencing, it seems that social sorting is indeed a grass-roots phenomenon.
Another big driver of political polarization is social media.
Most people go online to like and forward what they already agree with. Emotions drive online activity. The liking, therefore, is to express outrage and get scandalized about each and everything.
Scandals can now also develop and spread very fast. The media is adapting because online traffic and the number of clicks are crucial measures of success and sales arguments. As a result, people live in their own echo chambers.
Academic literature says that political polarization is caused by social sorting and social media.
Social sorting is when people make choices to live where they want to and socialize only with those who have alike mindsets.
Social media has also encouraged political polarization because it is another way for people to socialize with only those who agree with them. Facebook groups have developed that amplify already existing beliefs. The only way to undo this is for people to start to talk to each other again. But we don’t know how to talk to each other without yelling, which doesn’t work.
Political polarization is playing out in personal relationships, what I call fractured relationships. To end these and start to bring society together again, we need new tools. I’ve taken the social psychology literature on polarization and applied it to interpersonal relationships to create those tools.
Our political leaders win by sowing division, not by bringing people together. Democratic political systems face an interesting conundrum: once people decide how to vote, they do not typically change their minds. This, then, creates, for politicians, three types of people: those who will probably vote for you, those who probably won’t, and those who haven’t decided yet. For most of democracy’s history, the third group, the undecideds, have been the largest group of voters, and so politicians spent their time crafting policies that would attract the largest number of people.
In the past two decades, however, the political strategy has shifted; instead of focusing on convincing the undecided voters, the preferred strategy is to focus instead on “Get Out The Vote” (GOTV). In other words, s/he who gets more people to the polls on Election Day wins. This is important. It means that politicians in some democracies are concerned less with appealing to the wider masses than they are with ensuring that the people who have already decided to vote for them show up on Election Day. And how do you convince a group of homogenous voters to show up on Election Day? Convince them that there is an enemy that is plotting to destroy their way of life and the only way to stop them is to vote.
Some politicians love something called “wedge issues” – these are political issues where most people are on one side or the other and rarely in the middle (examples include abortion, gun rights, legalization of marijuana, LGBTQ+ rights, etc.). Political strategists will use these wedge issues to drive a wedge between voters, forcing them to take one side or the other. The point of this practice is not to convince anyone of anything, but instead to identify and rally the voters who agree with your position. After that, all you need to do is to convince those voters to show up on Election ay (and maybe convince the people on the other side that they don’t actually need to vote at all).
Political polarization, or partisanship as it is also called, is a direct result of political strategies designed to win elections without having to appeal to the masses. There are entire political machinations designed to drive people apart in order to use those divisions to win more votes. Our political leaders win by sowing division, not by bringing people together.
Those political machinations operate most obviously for politicians and political parties, but they are not the only ones who profit from wedging between voters. Media outlets, retail organizations, non-profits, online advertisers, internet giants, and other major industries can all profit in one way or another by capitalizing on clear polarization between demographics. By the way, this whole system is only in place because it works. So the next time that you are about to click a sensational headline about an issue that makes your blood boil, stop for a moment and ask yourself:
“Who is going to profit from you going down this rabbit hole? 9 times out of 10, it won’t be you.”
We have arrived at the final possible cause of our polarized era—leaders who foment polarization. Top political leaders occupy a paradoxical position. They are both contributors to and symbols of developments in their countries. Countries do not elect highly polarizing leaders unless they are in a highly polarized, or desperate, state. Venezuelans elected Hugo Chavez during an economic crisis and at a time when there were huge disparities between the rich and the poor. Filipinos elected Rodrigo Duterte in the midst of a wave of crime and corruption that they hoped he could stop. In the United States, most Trump voters felt threatened and marginalized, fearing that they were losing their place in the country and wanting to “make American great again.” Thus, the most significant contribution of leaders may be to give voice to the already felt grievances of members of the populace.
In conclusion, that one route to societal polarization lies through the combination of economic inequality, identity threat, and leaders who articulate the felt grievances of those who believe they are losing out. The formula looks like this:
Economic Inequality plus Identity Threat plus Articulated Grievances Equals Polarization. This article focused on the societal causes of polarization. No congregation is immune to these larger forces of polarization.
Morgen Makombo Sikwila
MSc Peace and Governance
BSc Counselling
Diploma in Environmental Health
Certificate in Marketing Management
Email address: morgensikwilam@gmail.com
Phone Number: 077282328256
