Comment: Reading the news and political commentary, you might assume New Zealand is becoming a more divided country – that we appear to be receding further into favoured ‘in-groups’ while resentment for disliked ‘out-groups’ continues to fester, creating an ‘us versus them’ divide.
Recent examples of polarising debates are often pointed to as evidence of this growing divide. These examples include the sharp disagreements about government restrictions related to the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as the Three Waters reforms that led to heated debates over co-governance.
Further ‘wedge’ issues such as immigration, climate emissions, and the role of te Tiriti o Waitangi in government have continued to generate strong reactions from partisans on both sides.
Overseas, meanwhile, political divisions have become increasingly bound up with identity, and dislike of political opponents. The United States is the obvious example, but similar trends have been observed across Europe and elsewhere.
In this environment, with growing attention given to polarisation and reports indicating social cohesion is eroding, it can feel as though New Zealand is also becoming increasingly divided.
But historically, New Zealand has looked rather different than other countries; research has generally found relatively limited affective polarisation here. Affective polarisation refers to the extent to which people dislike political parties or voters on the other side simply because they are on the other side (‘us versus them’).
Our recent research asked whether the tumultuous period since 2020 had finally changed this pattern of relatively low polarisation. To answer this question, we used data from the New Zealand Election Study, a long-running post-election survey that allows us to compare the views of voters across every election since the introduction of MMP.
The survey asks respondents to rate how much they like or dislike each political party on a scale from 0 to 10. We compared the party they liked most with their average rating of the other parties. Put simply, the larger the gap between the score for the preferred party compared with scores for other parties, the greater the extent of affective polarisation.
The result was perhaps more reassuring than the political atmosphere of the time might have suggested. Results show affective polarisation has declined in New Zealand since 2014, and the 2023 election was not more polarised than previous elections. In fact, we found that voters were less affectively polarised in 2023 than 2020.
The fall between 2020 and 2023 appears to have come from two directions: people were somewhat less enthusiastic about their preferred party, while becoming slightly more positive towards parties they did not support. Labour’s favourability fell substantially from its unusually high level in 2020, while National’s increased, bringing the two major parties to broadly similar levels of favourability in 2023.
This does not mean the 2023 campaign was free of hostility or sharp political disagreement, nor does it mean New Zealanders agree on the big questions facing the country. Rather, it suggests that disagreement has not necessarily translated into the kind of deep partisan divisions that characterise American politics.
We also found there are some interesting factors associated with the amount of affective polarisation among certain voters.
People who were more interested in politics tended to be more affectively polarised, while higher educational attainment was associated with lower levels. People towards the ideological extremes of both left and right also tended to show greater polarisation than those closer to the centre.
In 2023, affective polarisation was particularly evident among voters for left-leaning parties, with the relationship especially pronounced among Te Pāti Māori voters.
These findings are useful for thinking about the 2026 campaign because they point to something easily lost in the noise of election coverage; the loudest political disagreements are not necessarily evidence that the electorate as a whole is becoming divided into two hostile camps.
This distinction may matter this year: the 2026 election arrives after a parliamentary term in which several issues have generated substantial public controversy.
We don’t have a crystal ball, so we cannot say whether this year’s election will follow the trend of ‘business as usual’ or whether voters may become more affectively polarised, but our findings illustrate why the question remains important. If voters increasingly come to see political opponents not simply as people with different ideas, but as people they fundamentally dislike or distrust, that would represent something different and more damaging for our democracy than ordinary electoral competition.