Mounting evidence suggests that Latin American democracies are characterized by politics and societies becoming more divisive, confrontational, and polarized. This process, which we define here as the “new polarization” in Latin America, seems to weaken the ability of democratic institutions to manage and resolve social and political conflicts. Although recent scholarship suggests that polarization is integral to contemporary patterns of democratic “backsliding” seen in much of the world, this new polarization in the region has not yet received systematic scholarly attention. Aiming to address this gap in the literature, the different contributions in this special issue revise the conceptualization, measurement, and theory of a multidimensional phenomenon such as polarization, including both its ideological and affective dimensions, as well as perspectives at the elite and mass levels of analysis. Findings shed light on the phenomenon of polarization as both a dependent and an independent variable, contributing to comparative literature on polarization and its relationship to democratic governance.

越来越多的证据表明，拉丁美洲民主国家的特点是政治和社会变得更加分裂、对抗和两极分化。我们在此将这一过程定义为拉丁美洲的“新极化”，它似乎削弱了民主机构管理和解决社会和政治冲突的能力。尽管最近的学术研究表明，两极分化是世界大部分地区民主“倒退”的当代模式的组成部分，但该地区的这种新的两极分化尚未得到系统的学术关注。为了弥补文献中的这一空白，本期特刊中的不同贡献修正了多维现象（例如极化）的概念化、测量和理论，包括其意识形态和情感维度，以及精英和大众层面的观点的分析。研究结果揭示了极化现象既是因变量又是自变量，为极化及其与民主治理关系的比较文献做出了贡献。