David Schieferdecker has received a Best Paper Award from the Intergroup Communication Interest Group for his submission to the 2023 Annual Meeting of the International Communication Association (ICA) in Toronto. The winning paper is titled "Affective Polarization Between Opinion-Based Groups in a Context of Low Partisan Discord" and is co-authored by Philippe Joly and Thorsten Faas of the Otto Suhr Institute. Using panel data from the RAPID-COVID project, the papers shows that stable political identities have formed around opinions on COVID-19 containment in broad segments of the German public. The opinion camps show various group biases and feel social distance towards each other. These patterns emerge among a large proportion of supporters and strong opponents of the containment measures, yet remarkably not among moderate opponents.

Find more Information on the RAPID-COVID project here.