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Steffen Mau et al., "The Trigger Points: Inequality and Political Polarization in Contemporary Society" (Policy Press, 2026)
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Linus Westheuser
books welcome to the New Books Network
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Hannah Pfuhl
welcome to the New Books Network. We have the pleasure to welcome Linus Westheuser to present his new book, Trigger Inequality and Political Polarization in Contemporary Society. Written together with Stefan MAU and Thomas Lux. The book will be Published in June 2026 by Bristol University Press. Linus Westheuser is a senior researcher at the new Max Planck Institute for Political and Social Science. He directs the research area Social and Political Conflicts. He is a sociologist researching political divides and their roots in social inequality. My name is Hannah Pfuhl and I am a senior researcher as well at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies. Welcome to the New Books Network. To start us off, Linus, could you briefly introduce yourself to our listeners?
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Linus Westheuser
Yeah, so thanks a lot also for hosting this interview. As you said, now I just started working at this new Max Planck Institute in getting where we are building a new unit that works on inequality and political conflict. So kind of at the intersection of political sociology and political science. And that's also my background. So I did my PhD in Florence. It was already about questions of polarization, also class politics. I'm generally very interested in questions of working in middle class politics.
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Hannah Pfuhl
Great. And let's first go back to the beginning. What sparked the idea for this book and what brought the three of you together to collaborate on it?
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Linus Westheuser
Yeah, the original idea for the book, I was not present because I was still doing the PhD, the one I mentioned. But actually there was already this convergence there because Stefan MAU, who's the director of this new institute and my co author and my boss, basically, was also on the jury of my PhD, and he and Thomas Lux had been starting to think more and more about questions of political polarization and how they are linked to inequality. And that was also a very important theme of my PhD. And in my PhD, I also got to this point where I started with the concept of polarization. But then more and more, the closer I looked at the data, the more I found that this was not a very helpful concept, actually not a good metaphor for what I was seeing, especially when I started interviewing people. So talking to real people about politics, somehow opinions were not as neatly divided or ordered as this concept of polarization suggests. And so I started thinking about other ways of talking about the landscape of public opinion beyond this idea of polarization. And that's exactly also what Steffen and Thomas were thinking about in two papers that they wrote before the book, where they tried to show that the link between polarization and inequality is not so direct. And this is basically where this book originated. So there was already this convergence before we even really knew each other very well. But then Steffen, I guess, read my PhD and thought that I could be a good collaborator on this project.
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Hannah Pfuhl
Great. And before we dive deeper, let's clarify a few key terms for our audience. You already mentioned polarization. What is that?
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Linus Westheuser
Right. So also maybe to clarify kind of the intellectual background or the debates that this book comes from. Not sure it's the same debate also in other countries. In Germany after 2016 and the Trump election, but also the Brexit referendum and the kind of confusion that followed after it, where people were really wondering, what's going on? Is liberal democracy dying? Are we in a new era of political conflict? And so on, this idea of polarization really became a sort of master narrative. And basically what it assumes is that societies are increasingly falling apart into very neatly separated political camps. So this could be the political left and the political right, or liberals and conservatives, and that these camps are not just political disagreements, richer than political disagreement, but they are also linked to different social groups. And that this means that also society at large is increasingly divided into different tribes, as it's sometimes called in the context of Brexit, or I guess in the uk, there was this very prominent discourse around somewheres and anywheres, which is not just about opinions that you have on migration, but it's really about your whole being, your whole lifestyle that you also express through politics. So the idea of polarization is that you have a society that increasingly polarizes into very starkly opposed worldviews, and that in these worldviews you have a sort of bundling of a lot of different types of opinions. So your opinions on migration will be part of this picture. Your opinions on climate change, your position on LGBT rights, or quote unquote, wokeness, all of these will be part of a package of a conservative or liberal worldview. And then this will also be socially sorted. So that, for example, in this very stereotypical view, you have this urban, academically trained middle class that is very liberal on migration, on climate, on diversity, and on the other hand, you have a very conservative or even reactionary white rural working class, for example. We had these sorts of discourses. So this is the discourse that we found being very prominent in German debates. But I think also in other countries, they became very prominent after 2016 in particular. And this is basically also the discourse that we challenge and where we try to show that actually it's not very helpful to think about politics in this way. And you miss a lot of very important things if you always break it down to this type of image.
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Hannah Pfuhl
Thank you. And then another term that comes up in your book again and again are cleavages. What are that?
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Linus Westheuser
So cleavage theory comes from. Political science is a very old tradition that basically tries to understand the structuring of party systems, starting from the observation that in many countries you have similar structures and party systems. You have a center left party that used to be socialist or social democratic. The central right party is Christian Democrat or conservative. And this is relatively, or used to be at least relatively stable over long periods of time. So what Lipset and Rockland, the originators of Klavijiri, tried to understand is where does this structure come from? And where they seek this explanation is in the social structuration of party systems. So which types of classes or social groups are political projects rooted in? So cleavage theory is then trying to explain the divisions in politics through the divisions in society. And the type of discourse I was talking about earlier about, for example, an urban middle class versus a rural working class. This is maybe a very crude Way of continuing this idea of cleavage theory, that all the conflicts that you find in the political sphere are expressions of deeper conflicts in the social sphere.
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Hannah Pfuhl
Great. Yeah. And then finally, the obvious one as it is in the title, what are trigger points?
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Linus Westheuser
This is one of the chapters of the book and it was our publishers who were smart enough to then turn it into the title of the whole book, because the original title that we chose was something very boring. And I think it wouldn't have had the readership that it had if we had stuck with our titles. Trigger Points, I think sounds quite dynamic. Basically what where this concept originated was that we had this basic observation in the distribution of opinions of public opinion that showed us that German society, but the same in other societies, is not very polarized. The majority of people are always in the middle of a lot of questions that you ask. And there's also very little coherence in. In the positionings of people. So they will say a very right wing thing in one moment, they will say a very left wing thing in the next moment. So on the one hand you see almost like a lack of structure in public opinion for a large part of the population. But then at the same time, what we also observed, especially when we did focus groups where we had ordinary citizens discuss about political issues, we saw that there were certain moments where people got very, very, very fired up in the discussions and very vehement in their positionings, even though they were exactly the ones who before were more middle of the road in their positionings or not very coherent and so on. So we're trying to understand how it can be that you have a population that is overall not very polarized in its opinions, but that still has this debate, for example, about wokeness, which I mentioned before, or in the German context, about a gendered reform of languages, but even sometimes very odd things. Like in Germany there was a debate about cargo bikes, which you will maybe be familiar with the. A subsidy for cargo bikes. That is a very peripheral topic, you would think, to especially to people's everyday lives. But that also led to very, very emotional debates because it was associated with the certain idea of who this proposal was coming from and what it implies, the whole subtext of it. So trying to understand how these debates get so fired up in a population that is actually not so polarized. This is what the concept of trigger points is for. Maybe I can say a bit more about this later. What exactly we found what trigger points are, but that's basically what it stands for, is to look at these very heated Debates in a population that is actually not that polarized.
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Hannah Pfuhl
And then the German edition is a 540 page sociological work and yet it became a bestseller in 2023. Were you surprised by the level of response and what do you think resonated with Reader?
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Linus Westheuser
Yes, very much. We were extremely surprised and so were the publishers. I don't think they saw this coming at all. I mean, our book, we tried to write it in a very accessible way, but still it is also a scientific book. So it's really at the boundary of maybe more on the scientific side or the academic side than on the trade book side. But apparently it really kind of hit a nerve. So a lot of people at least bought the book. I'm not sure how many people actually read all of it, but I mean, I think the way I would explain it to myself is that there had been for a very long time this discourse that I sketched at the beginning of kind of the woke middle class and, and the right wing workers. And this type of discourse was becoming very stale. And I think it still is, even though it also continues nowadays. It's being reheated over and over again. But I think there was also a longing among many people for a bit more complexity in understanding politics today. And I think that's what we were offering. We were basically disentangling a lot of things that before had been thrown together. So, for example, also this idea of the culture war being a type of conflict that subsumes a lot of issues like migration, like LGBT rights, like climate change in public discussions. Often they get thrown together and it's kind of all the same. And you're like a green pro diversity, pro migration liberal, or you're the opposite on all of these issues. Well, actually, we show it's not that easy. Actually. All of these three issues work quite separately. They have their own dynamics and they don't bundle together so neatly. I think that's what many people liked about it also, because politically I think it helps you loosen up a little bit. You see, you see the political landscape in a less hopeless way, maybe because you start realizing that there's a lot of fuzziness or lack of structure also in public opinion, which makes it very volatile and makes it thinkable that it can swing in many different directions. And that this thing that we saw in the last years, where it was only the radical riot basically that was dictating the agenda in public discourse, is that this is not inevitable, that you also have a lot of other impulses in the wider population that could also be activated with the right kind of politics.
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Hannah Pfuhl
Thank you. And maybe before we really speak about the arguments of the book, could you walk us through the methodology behind this research project? How did you approach studying these dynamics?
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Linus Westheuser
Yeah, so the basic, the most important data sources that we used was a survey, a representative survey of the German population and focus groups that I already mentioned, which were sampled according to class. But then we also had people with different political positions kind of clashing together. So we recruited people knowing that they had different opinions on various issues and put them in a room together. But these were just ordinary citizens who didn't know each other. And then we asked them to discuss all these issues that I already mentioned, like migration, diversity, climate, but also inequality, distributive issues. And then we brought this together with existing data, which we especially use to also track changes in public opinion over time. Where we looked, for example, whether migration politics had become more polarized in the last 30 years or not. And actually we found that it hadn't. It hadn't been an increase in polarization. And this was true for all the issues that we looked at. So we used existing secondary data for these types of analyses, and then we weaved them together with our own quantitative and qualitative data where we always first try to map the field in these, as we call them, arenas. So, for example, migration as a political arena, and then try to go in depth into how people argue the different positions in that arena based on what people were saying in the focus groups and also get at the ambivalence in the positionings of many people from the way they were hesitating in the focus groups or making arguments that were not really straightforward. I am in favor of this or that, but always had, or in many cases had this form of a yes, but yes, we should help people in need, but not everyone can come, et cetera. So this was a very typical kind of figure of speech that we saw in the focus groups and that we tried to bring together with the quantitative evidence from the survey.
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Hannah Pfuhl
J mentioned it so the central part really of the book are the discussions of the different arenas of inequality conflict. You identify four dimensions, top versus bottom, inside versus outside, us versus them, and today versus tomorrow. Could you guide us through these and explain what each reveals? Maybe by starting with top versus bottom?
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Linus Westheuser
Yeah. So basically the idea of these arenas, we call them arenas of inequality conflict to indicate that. So these are different issues. You could say, like in political science, you would say this is about redistribution. Then the inside outside arena is about migration and the ask them arena is about diversity, and the today tomorrow arena is about climate change. But what we try to do by also giving them these names is to link them to specific forms of social inequality. So, for example, top bottom, where I think it's the most obvious, it's of course top versus bottom is the inequality of material wealth and income, but also, for example, the position that people have in relation to the welfare state as an institution that is supposed to level these types of inequalities and how people argue about these inequalities, which of course are very politicized and have been for a very long time. I mean, the 20th century was essentially politically a struggle over top bottom inequalities and the construction of institutions like the welfare state, but also, for example, labor parties or center left parties that would express the interests of those on the bottom originally in the political process and thereby kind of compensate for the lack of market power of these groups. So we looked at, okay, how is this being discussed about today? And in that arena, it was very striking to see how demobilized this political arena is of struggles over redistribution and material inequality, where we also pick up a term by another German sociologist, Klaus Derreu, who talks about demobilized class societies. So we still live in class societies in Germany, as in other western Countries and people notice this a lot. And it's an important dimension of people's daily experience. For example, when it's about rising rents here in Berlin, a huge topic, but also of course, financing infrastructure through taxes and the exploding wealth at the top of the distribution. So all of these topics are very present and salient, but at the same time, politically they are very demobilized because you don't really have strong institutions like the former central left parties or still existing central left parties. But formally they were the institutions that would really politicize these types of top, bottom inequalities or unions did. And you had these kind of tight knit social media viewers in the working class as well, that would keep this arena of top, bottom inequalities very, very present in people's minds and also directed a kind of political energy of those at the bottom towards the ones at the top. So that addressing these types of inequalities would mean demanding redistribution. Well, today all these challenger institutions or parties on the left are very weak, are historically at a low point. And so there is very little hope basically among people who are far from politics, for example, in the working class, that through collective action you can change something about top bottom inequalities, especially when it comes to the distribution of surplus in the workplace, where it's completely naturalized that of course the corporations take the largest share of the profits or the bosses take more than the workers. And this is very depoliticized. And the consequence of this is that then people instead tend to punch downwards and where it still seems a little bit more thinkable that you could take something away from redistribution even further downwards, so that welfare transfer recipients, for example, should get less support from the state. This is a type of politics that is also about distribution of material wealth. But of course it's not one that leads to more redistribution or more equitable type of politics, but it's a symptom of this demobilized class society and its politics. So that's the basic finding, I would say, about that arena.
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Hannah Pfuhl
Thank you. And then going to the next arena, inside versus outside. What is this arena about and what did it reveal to you?
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Linus Westheuser
So inside outside is about migration. And there, I think it's the dynamic that we try to unpick in the, in the book about going away from this idea of polarization as the kind of master narrative, I think becomes most visible because the inside outside arena, so the migration arena is the most polarized in a way, but at the same time underneath polarized opinions. So closing the borders versus Opening them, being more accommodating to migrants versus having a very tough. Of course, in that regard, underneath these antagonistic positions, you have actually a lot of consensus that often remains implicit and unsaid. And this, for example, is that almost everyone agrees that there shouldn't be too much migration, but that under some circumstances migration is actually legitimate so that it can be economically beneficial. And it also is ethically correct to let people in for humanitarian reasons. There's very, very, very large agreement in the whole population on these points. The same with ideas then, about kind of the internal border, where the first one is the question, who's allowed to come in? So the external border of the nation state, internal border is more about membership in the national community. And also there there's a very large disagreement, a very large agreement that migrants should be integrated into a cultural community, which often is linked to language and then the economic system, which is linked to work. So integration into language and work is what everyone wants, basically. And then the conflict. What was interesting to observe also, especially in the focus group, is basically which side of the realities of migration society different people emphasize. So you have one side who always talk about those elements of migration that are too much, that are out of control, and about those types of migrants that are not integrated culturally, that don't speak the language or refuse to learn the language, or who don't work. And you have the other side who emphasize all the examples of, for example, migrants who are very polite, who speak the language, who make an effort to fit in and work very hard. But underneath this, there is this strange agreement that actually all these ideas about integration and the regulation of migration flows is actually shared across these. These different camps. So this was one kind of core observation that I thought was very interesting. But then we also go through the different ideas about the deservingness of migrants and basically under which conditions people are seen as deserving of access to the national territory, but also to national membership.
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Hannah Pfuhl
And from there you then go to the arena of inequality of us versus them. What is this about?
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Linus Westheuser
Yeah, so also, again, maybe to clarify why we talk about inequality in this context also inside, outside, the migration question, of course, is massively about inequality, because whether you're born in a rich country or not, whether you gain access to the territory of your rich country or not, and the labor markets and welfare systems and so on is a question of huge consequences for inequality. And it's the same for these are stem inequalities, which are basically about the recognition for different social groups. So then in everyday life this would be expressed by if you hold hands with your partner on public transport, will you be looked at strangely? Will you be threatened? Is your presence in a public space or at a gathering something that increases the value of that space and that people like to see, or is it something that stigmatizes that place? For example, if there are young migrant men hanging out in a certain part of the inner city, does that automatically make that part of the city dodgy or considered dangerous independently of what it actually is? These types of questions are what we look at in that arena. And we think they are also a very important dimension of inequality. So what is being struggled over there is essentially the boundaries of who gets included in this center of society and society's self conception and who remains at the margin and who is devalued through their identity or their social group position. And how is this mode of everyday recognition, for example, through the way people talk to people or look at people and so on? How is this being politicized as a question of inequality and maybe to just kind of pick out. One insight that I found very interesting in that arena was that in a certain way a liberalization of everyday scripts in German society was much more progressed than I had expected. Where for example, there was one participant in a focus group who was talking about the definition of gender or who is a man and so on, and started talking about a drag queen, it was popular on television and then said, well, yeah, him I would also consider a man maybe a little bit different from then quote unquote, and making these marks of quotation marks with her finger, a normal man. And I thought this was very interesting as an observation that these quotation marks were signaled when using the word normal. Because basically this, this means that the question of what is normal is not self evident anymore. It's clear that this is a question that is being negotiated in social processes. And in this case the person doing this was a service worker from a very poor peripheral area of Berlin here, who really was not coming from an academic, super lefty background, politically correct or whatever, was a very normal person, but who in a very normalized everyday way questioned this idea of what is normal. So this I thought was very interesting. And on the other hand also the difference between different ideas of tolerance that you could see in the way people talked about as stem inequalities, where there's a permissive idea of tolerance which basically says I'm fine with whatever people want to do as long as I'm not affected. And basically I don't see much of it. And it's not really intruding into my daily life. Of course, this is a very limited conception of tolerance. Also, politically, I think it's something that also, for example, LGBT movements have always pushed beyond, for very good reasons. But it's very interesting to see that this is very much the baseline position in the German population, that this real active intolerance of saying it's wrong to be homosexual, for example, is something that is hardly sayable in public discourse. And instead, what people do is to say, I'm fine with whatever people want to do as long as. And then this is where all the conditionalities and restrictions come in. As long as children are not involved, people are not too public and in my face about their sexuality, for example. And this is where then the tolerance gets restricted and people draw these very strong boundaries. And this is opposed to a different idea of tolerance, which basically says that diversity in itself is something valuable and that it is good to have diverse ideas of how to live, diverse ethnic backgrounds, sexual orientations, and that this is inherently good somehow, and not just something that we permit graciously as a social majority. So there are these types of nuances that I thought were very interesting to observe.
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Hannah Pfuhl
Yes, for sure. And then the final arena is today versus tomorrow. What is this arena about?
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Linus Westheuser
So this is about questions of climate change or environmentalism, maybe more broadly, we picked this term today, tomorrow inequalities, because in these questions of climate protection, in many cases, it's really about whether you safeguard the interests that people have nowadays. So, for example, you know, the car that you already own, or a heating system that you have built into your. Your house, and that based on this, you. You have, you know, certain interests of keeping that heating system running for a long enough time for it to be worth the investment, or at the larger scale, fossil fuel investments. They are the today side of these inequalities, where ensuring the profitability, the continued profitability of these fossil fuel investments is very much centered on these interests of the. And then on the other hand, you have the tomorrow, which of course, is about averting catastrophic climate change and also safeguarding the interests of all the groups who will be affected by climate change, which, of course, is a massive question, again, of social inequality also in terms of who is most affected by this. So because, you know, people living in poorly insulated houses or people having to work in workplaces that are not well protected from higher temperatures tend to be working class people, of course, as opposed to, say, managerial employees who work in offices that have AC systems and Stay cool all throughout summer. So the question of the effectiveness by climate change is an inequality question. But also, of course, the question of the causation of climate change is massively about inequality because we know that essentially the rich are burning up the planet and that a large part of the population already now, even in a very rich country like Germany, lives within the boundaries of what is possible with the, with the resources that the atmosphere can bear or the CO2 that the atmosphere can bear. But then what we thought that again in our data was that these types of inequalities, so who is affected by climate change and who causes it, were actually not so much at the center of the debate, but instead the inequality that everyone was talking about was really about who has to shoulder the burden of transformation costs. So in terms of, for example, changes in the energy structure, mobility structure and so on. And there what we saw, that I thought was quite interesting to see was that there was a strong class divide also in the way people talked about this issue, which we called hardly taking over some discourses that had already been there, but two different ecologies. So an ecology of the middle class and an ecology of the working class. And on the middle class side, you see that there's a very cognitive kind of knowledge and insight centered approach to climate change where this is a question of science. People just need to know the science, respect the science, follow the science, but also that by explaining to people what the consequences of their actions are, you will get them to change, you change their consciousness, and so, and then they will behave differently on an individual level. This, this was a very typical middle class approach that we saw also in, in, in our data, which basically approaches climate change as an ethical problem, also as a structural problem, but most of the energy in what people talk about is about the room for a maneuver that every single individual has. And emphasizing this room for maneuver is really what the middle class climate discourse often is about. While on the other hand, you have an ecology of the working class that functions very differently and that really centers on the constraints that you live under. You know that the costs of mobility, for example, or heating or food, rent and so on, they are what is being talked about. So climate change basically becomes another layer of burden that, or also the costs of the ecological transformation become another burden on a household budget that is already strained and, and under a lot of pressure. So you see that again there. It's not so much that one half of the population thinks that climate change is not real and we don't need to do anything and the other one is very activist about this. A very, very large part, at least of the German population. This is different, of course, in the US for example, but in the German population there's very large consensus that climate change is a problem. And there's also a type of everyday discourse where a lot of people will say, I want my grandchildren to still have a planet, even if they are then skeptical about certain measures like banning diesel cars or mandating different type of fuel for heating systems and so on. But there is this type of consensus. But the type of stories that people tell differ very starkly where for some people the present time is one of overabundance, we are consuming too much, everything is too much already. We will get to bill for this in the future in the form of climate change, while for others, the present already is very precarious and you're already having a very hard time in the here and now. So the end of the month in a way is much closer than the end of the world that is being proclaimed in, in climate discourses. So that's, that's, you know, it's kind of one snippet. There's more in this chapter, but this, this is one of the elements.
- [41:19]
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- [41:39]
Hannah Pfuhl
thank you so much for guiding us through these four arenas. And in the book you also distinguish between the social space and the political space of inequality conflicts. What is the difference between the two and why is that distinction important?
- [41:56]
Linus Westheuser
Yeah, this is basically this, this attempt of checking whether this idea of these polarization discourses that I mentioned at the beginning, so that there is this very tight link between people's social position and their political views, whether this is actually correct. Because there is this idea in public perceptions that, for example, if you're a white working class guy in the countryside, you will definitely be right wing, you know, and you will be climate skeptic, you will not think very highly of the inclusion of trans people, and you will be skeptical of refugee migration, for example. So there are these types of assumptions. And basically what we do is to check, on the one hand, this is the chapter about the social space, how close this link actually is between social position and opinions in these four arenas, and then on the other hand, to see how political sorting so whether people lean towards the left or the right of the spectrum explains people's attitudes or the distribution of public opinion in a different way or better, and how the two are linked, basically. And maybe to just kind of highlight two findings from these two chapters. On the social level, what we see is that you have a general trend that there are class differences in people's positions that go exactly in that direction that I just kind of painted a stereotypical picture of that members of the working class tend to be a bit more conservative on these new issues of climate, diversity and migration. Not so on the redistributive side, where they lean more towards the left. And you have the middle class that tends to be a bit more progressive on the questions of climate, migration and diversity. But what we also saw is that within the classes you have a very, very large degree of variance. So that within the working class you have very, very different positions. And actually the spread of opinions, if you imagine the distribution of opinions from the conservative to the progressive poll, the spread between those polls is much larger in the working class than in other classes. So it's much harder to say if you pick any random working class person, what their views will be, then it will be in the middle class, where it's much more likely that they will be on the progressive side. And they are so much more coherently. And we also charted for education, where we basically saw that the higher people's education degrees, the more coherently the different arenas would be bundled together. Someone who has the Ph.D. like you and me. It's more likely that we are on the progressive side of the spectrum. But even if we aren't, we are much more likely to then be very coherently right wing. Then it would be very likely that we would be anti migration, anti diversity and anti climate, and then also neoliberal on the redistributive arena, but people with lower formal education. This is actually not the case. People are much more ad hoc in their positionings. That's also something you see in individual interviews, that there's a way of reasoning that is much more flexible and that much less follows certain prepackaged bundles of political identities like left and right, liberal and conservative. It's much more situational and also often relational, where it depends on the situation, but also the candidate, for example, espousing certain opinions. So I think this is a very important shift in the view basically from class or education means, where you see certain class differences or educational differences to the distributions behind them and then the realities in those classes. And I think basically what follows from this is that you have to take a much closer look Especially at the working class, because it's so central for current realignments in politics. And understand that there are many different fractions within the working class ideologically, but also socially, it's a very diverse class. And also people hold very diverse views. And sometimes one and the same individual kind of, as I mentioned before, will say something very left wing in one moment and very right wing in the next moment. So we're trying to not say that, okay, there is no link between the social and the political sphere, but it works in a much, much more nuanced and complex way that is actually much more interesting as well than these very stereotypical depictions of social figures working in middle class. And in the chapter on the political space, basically we take parties or voting intentions and then see how the different electorates positioning themselves in relation to our four arenas. And basically the core finding there is that here there are much, much starker differences, especially between certain parties. In the German context, it's the Greens and the ifd, for example, which is the radical right, populist, radical right party, where the electorates of those two parties, they are very, very, very clearly ideologically aligned on the liberal side or progressive side of the spectrum for the Greens, or on the right wing, reactionary side for the ifd. But this is their kind of core electorates, not even the sympathizers. And everything outside of this becomes much fuzzier again. So basically, what we take from this, also from other data, I don't want to go too much into detail here, but is that in a lot of cases, what you see as polarized and polarizing public debates is not just a mirror image of divides that you have in society, but are actually divides in the political space between specific political actors who also draw a political profit from depicting society as fundamentally divided and also as more divided than it actually is. And I think radical right parties are the most relevant here because they are basically always saying either you have common sense, you know, and you align with our positions, or you're on the side of the woke elites in the cities. And this is something that we call in the book, we use this concept of polarization entrepreneurs. So basically of actors that try to make society more polarized, or that claim that society is more polarized than it actually is because it benefits their political project, while actually also in terms of political views, you see a lot of overlap between the positions that people have.
- [49:47]
Hannah Pfuhl
Yeah. Thank you. Although the book focuses on Germany, what lessons or insights do you think resonate beyond the specific context? And what are, what might Be of interest for the rest of the world.
- [50:03]
Linus Westheuser
Yes, I often encountered this when talking with people outside of Germany. They said, okay, this kind of less starkly divided image of society, this might be true in Germany where everything is still fine and people get along and everyone's polite and so on. But this is definitely not true in the UK or in the US for example, or Argentina or other countries that have this image of being much more polarized. And we looked at studies that compared this transnationally and wrote a new introduction now for the English translation, where we also discussed this a little bit. And you see that from the angle that we take, this actually travels to a lot of different contexts, even the ones that you wouldn't expect, like the US or the uk where politics is certainly very, very polarized. So public debates or so media systems, social media debates and so on, they are extremely polarized. And we're not denying this. And this is actually also the case in Germany, increasingly so, but definitely in some arenas. But the attitudes that you see in the broader population are different. A different dimension or just a different reality. And you see that even in a very polarized country like the U.S. you have this very, very large part of the country that is quite de ideologized, very volatile, and it has very contradictory positions, even on high stakes public issues. And this is also what explains the volatility, the increasing volatility that you see across Western countries and party systems, that there is a lack of anchoring in a way of positions and also a much looser bundling of these issues across the different arenas. It's much less given that someone who's migration skeptic will also be a transphobe. In the high profile cases that you see on the media or in the most divisive social media figures, these arenas will always align. But if you talk to ordinary people, you see that actually there's a much more contradictory reality. And this I think is something that definitely travels to other contexts, this kind of change of perspective where I think a lot of political analysis always looks at the tail ends of the opinion distribution and takes the most extreme groups, very right wing groups, very liberal groups, because of course there are these urban academics who are very left wing. We're also not saying that they don't exist. I even know some of them. But it's a very simplified type of analysis. If you only look at this group and then compare it to a very right wing group of say, rural dwellers. And forgetting this middle ground in between that, I think our book very much centers Also there, I think it's important to say we're not taking a normative position of saying those people in the center are the ones who are right or who are more rational or, you know, they keep a level head and then this is what everyone should be like. You know, I think in many contexts this middle ground can either hold views that are very appalling to, you know, to other observers. I mean, Certainly in the 1950s, Germans in this middle ground, you know, they thought homosexuality was a sin or a disease or something. So we're not trying to say that the center is normatively better, but it is interesting to look at it, especially because it is so contradictory and because it can swing in so many different ways in the current moment. And also the lack of coherence of many people's worldviews, I think is very, very important there as a starting point. But it also leads us away from this very simplified idea of, okay, we have this one tribe on the one side and the other tribe on the other side, and this is what politics is about. So I think this definitely travels. And maybe if I can add a second point that I think also travels is exactly this idea that. And it's a politicization of certain issues from above, so top down, through political entrepreneurs, that in the current moment, I think is much more important for polarization dynamics than this idea that there is already a division in society that's merely reflected or mirrored in the party system. So looking at the agency of political entrepreneurs, I think is extremely important and also increasingly something that political science of course focuses on. And then maybe if, I mean, just to add one last point that I think is also, I think could be helpful by distinguishing these different arenas, which you could say they are different issues or different kind of fields of political contention, but also linking them to different types of inequality and their sociological foundations. I think we could also get beyond this very sterile opposition between economic politics on the one hand and identity politics on the other. Because I think within all of these arenas, the way we set them up, it is always about inequality and including material questions. So there is economic politics also in terms of migration access or in terms of who has access to certain privileged forms of marriage, in the diversity in the STEM arena, or in terms of climate change, of course, massively it's about material consequences, but also in the top, bottom arena, this whole question of who deserves what share of the country's wealth and so on, a lot of cultural factors also enter and a lot of questions of identity between the hard working nationals versus those who only take and make demands on national solidarity. And so a lot of these questions are also framed in cultural terms. So we're trying to also break this, I think, very unhelpful distinction between distributive and identity politics, and instead offer this more complex heuristic of the four arenas that I think you can directly apply to other national contexts.
- [57:27]
Hannah Pfuhl
Thank you so much, Linus, for this very holistic idea of the book and really guiding us through the different arguments and dimensions and arenas. As my final question, of course, what are you working on right now? What kinds of questions are currently shaping your research? And maybe also where is your research group now heading?
- [57:50]
Linus Westheuser
Right. So at the moment, I mean, we're working on a number of smaller projects, for example, looking at class consciousness, or also looking at the perception of polarization and the perception of how widespread certain opinions are in the population and how this affects people's politics. So these are still also quite closely linked to something that we looked at in this book, trigger points. But we're also now working on a new book that will have a similar basic approach, also using qualitative and quantitative data, looking at the German case, but then also embedding it comparatively with data from other countries. And there we look at attitudes towards social change, because this is something that we noticed as a kind of a thread running through all of these arenas that we looked at in trigger points, that the basic relation that we have towards the transformation of society, for example, in terms of recognition orders, also in terms of the ecological transformation or the increasing ethnic diversity of the country and so on, this is something that runs through these different arenas and almost in certain moments has a pre political element to it, where it's a basic feeling that you have, is there already too much change, is too much happening, or are you impatient and you want more to change and you feel like the country is stagnating and you need more progress or even also disruptive change in a more right wing direction and so on. These are basic divisions that run through the population. And I think also explain why the current moment is so heated and there's so much uncertainty also in politics these days, because there is objectively a lot of change and the institutions that used to buffer the fallout of this change in the past are not working in the way they used to. So people are confronted with a lot of transformative burdens or maybe also opportunities in their individual lives and how they deal with this and how this translates then into politics is something that we want to look at more closely now and I just spent the last two weeks interviewing people and also conducting focus groups again with different people on this question and was extremely interesting and I really look forward to looking at this more closely.
- [60:40]
Hannah Pfuhl
Thank you so much. And we are really looking forward to that as well and hearing more about the research. Your book Triggerpunkte is already available with Zurkamp in German and Trigger Points will be available with Bristol University Press in June 2026. Thank you so much. Linus.
- [60:59]
Linus Westheuser
Thank you. Thank you very much for hosting.